Constraints on Reflexivizations
Dominique Sportiche
November 2023 

NOTA BENE: Version 11 adds in an appendix a more detailed critical discussion of some presuppositional approaches to self (e.g. Sauerland's 2013 or McKillen 2016). Version 10 was minor revision of version 9, fixing small mistakes and updating some discussion. ABSTRACT: Discussing reflexivization via autonomous morphemes (e.g. via self-anaphora like En- glish herself, French lui-même or Hebrew acmo, or via ‘pronominal’ morphemes such as German sich or French se), I show that lexical or syntactic bundling via adicity reduction or predicate reflexivization (e.g. via self incorporation) in these languages is too strong to be the general mechanism involved, favoring analyses in terms of direct cov- aluation (via the antecedent binding the anaphor) as in the classical view. This means in particular that what counts as an anaphor cannot be related to self incorporation (into predicates), raising the question of how to derive why anaphors are anaphors, a question discussed in Charnavel and Sportiche (2021) and Charnavel and Sportiche (2023). I also discuss some (limited) boundary conditions on analyses for incorporated English self- or French auto-, and explore syntactic (as opposed to lexical) analyses for predicates prefixed with self- or auto-, as well as for inherently reflexive verbs.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005488 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	UCLA ms.
keywords:	binding theory, reflexivization, reflexive, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v11 [March 2023] v10 [January 2023] v9 [April 2022] v8 [January 2022] v7 [December 2020] v6 [December 2020] v5 [December 2020] v4 [December 2020] v3 [December 2020] v2 [October 2020] v1 [August 2020]
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