reflexives in subject position

[David Pesetsky]

At 10:08 AM -0800  2/15/00, Balthasar Bickel wrote:
> John Myhill wrote:
>> Regarding the ostensible reflexives in subject position: Are the people
>> who have suggested them (in e.g. Georgian, Nepali) sure that these aren't
>> logophoric/long-range 'reflexives'? In Japanese, 'jibun', the ostensible
>
> I agree, this distinction is very important to make, and not only that:
> Nepali also allows exophoric uses of the reflexives, similar to the
> emphatic uses that Edith Moravcsik talked about yesterday and that Nino
> Amiridze discussed his reply. In the construction I quoted, however, we
> are dealing with a truly anaphoric (more precisely, kataphoric) use of
> the reflexive. There is no need nor suggestion in the clause to construe
> any exophoric or discourse bearing. What's crucial about the Nepali
> construction (based on a preliminary analysis) is that this is the
> standard way of indicating coreference between A and O if (a) the
> speaker wants to indicate a non-volitional meaning, and (b) the clause
> involves a psychological predicate.

Even in Japanese, the bimorphemic zibun-zisin is supposed to differ from
zibun in requiring the nearest subject as its antecedent -- yet it is fine
in nominative subject position, unlike Standard English -self forms.

Some years ago, Pierre Pica suggested that bimorphemic reflexives (and
reciprocals) always require a sentence-internal antecedent, with locality
conditions related to intervening subjects, while monomorphemic forms
typically do not have this property.  There are some counterexamples (I
don't know about languages that use forms like 'his head' for 'himself) and
I'm not sure what the current wisdom is on Pica's generalization.

There has been a lot of work on the typology of reflexives,
semi-reflexives, quasi-reflexives, etc. in recent years.  I know that Ken
Safir (Rutgers) has an ongoing project about this that has led to a number
of interesting publications.  His papers would also be a good place to find
references to other work.

-David Pesetsky
*************************************************************************
David Pesetsky  [pesetsk at mit.edu]
Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
E39-237 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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