jibun

[Tom Givon]

John,

I really think it's time, maybe, that you started worrying a bit about
the tone of (some of) your submissions. We are not here to stick it to
the other guys & call them ignorant. We are here to learn, together.
Maybe, just maybe, you too have something to learn from 'the
formalists'. Have you ever considered that possibility? Well, maybe you
don't need to. But maybe some of the rest of us, who are not so smart,
might? At any rate, let's keep FUNKNET a forum where people come, in
good faith, to learn from each other. After all, if we all believed in,
and knew, exactly the same things, it would be a rather boring place,
with not much learning... Best,  TG
=====================

John Myhill wrote:
>
> 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
> >http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/pesetsky.home.html