jibun

[John Myhill]

Dear David,
I find it difficult (actually impossible) to believe that ANY use of jibun
is constrained to take a subject as an antecedent, or ANY syntactically
defined category for that matter, as an antecedent. It's a pronoun with a
particular discourse/referential function; to try to delimit its usage
syntactically is like trying to delimit the usage of 'someone'
syntactically. If you want to participate in an informed discussion of
this, David, I suggest you learn enough Japanese to read it, see how jibun
is actually used, and see if you can come up with a syntactic rule to
account for it. And if you insist on having a naive discussion of this,
divorced of first-hand knowledge of the language or second-hand knowledge
of the actual usage of the word, please don't do it on funknet, do it on
some formalist network where such discussions are presumably routine.
John Myhill






>At 10:30 AM -0800  2/17/00, cmanning at SULTRY.ARTS.USYD.EDU.AU wrote:
>> On 17 February 2000, David Pesetsky wrote:
>>  > 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.
>>
>> The emphasis here being on "is supposed to differ" -- while this
>> putative requirement has been maintained in a number of formal syntax
>> papers so that "Principle A" arguments can be made, it is of rather
>> doubtful validity.  (This is briefly discussed on pp. 63-64 of Manning,
>> Sag, and Iida, The lexical integrity of Japanese causatives in Levine
>> and Green eds. Studies in Contemporary Phrase Structure Grammar.)
>
>I don't have that book here.  What is the claim, that there is no effect of
>intervening subjects, or that there is an effect, but it's more complicated?
>
>-DP
>*************************************************************************
>David Pesetsky  [pesetsk at mit.edu]
>Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Linguistics
>Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
>E39-237 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
>Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
>(617) 253-0957 office           (617) 253-5017 fax
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