The secret life of pronouns

This thesis explores the relationship between anaphora and movement on a wide array of data primarily from Russian. I argue that anaphors and pronominals are underlyingly the same syntactic entity, an index, whereas conditions A and B of binding theory should be substituted by principles regulating the spell-out of an anaphoric element as a reflexive or a pronominal. Through cyclic covert movement of an index, accompanied by cyclic evaluation of its phonological form, I account for the constraints against backward anaphora, or cataphora, found in Russian, as well as subject-orientation of anaphors and anti-subject orientation of the pronominals. The proposal derives the systematic complementarity of distribution of anaphors and pronominals in some contexts, as well as systematic lack thereof in others. Finally, I explore the interaction of anaphora with overt movement, scrambling in particular. I conclude that reconstruction effects correlate with case assignment in the way predicted by Wholesale Late Merger theory. Using this conclusion, I provide an argument in favor of existence of Determiners in Russian.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Nikolaeva, Liudmila, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David Pesetsky

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/87500

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/87500