Locality in Malayalam Anaphor Binding
Athulya Aravind
June 2021 

The Dravidian long-distance anaphor 'taan' poses a locality puzzle. It is generally thought to be an anti-local anaphor: it cannot be bound by a co-argument. However, in select environments involving a morpheme 'koL', this requirement seems to be relaxed, and we find what looks like local binding. Drawing primarily on data from Malayalam, I show that this apparent exceptionality is only apparent. The relevant environments in Malayalam involve a periphrastic progressive construction, comprising of a light verb and a PP embedding a nominalized complement. This bifurcation of the clause means that there is no selective “anti-antilocality” with 'taan'.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006106 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
keywords:	binding, long distance reflexives, locality, syntax
Downloaded:	359 times

 

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