What Can Mongolian Tell Us about Reflexives and Reflexivity?
Chigchi Bai
January 2025 

This paper investigates the reflexive strategies in Mongolian, thereby showing how reflexivity can interact with different semantic effects and how it should be characterized as such in a broader sense. The hallmark of reflexivity in Mongolian is not an anaphor of any kind but rather a clitic, -aa, which occurs in the rightmost position of any kind of phrase requiring it. The proper function of this clitic is to indicate the identity between a possessor in a noun phrase and a local subject or between an embedded subject (in common sense) and a matrix subject. It also displays three binding properties: it is disallowed in nominative position, licensed by a local subject, and blocked by switch reference. The reflexive strategies in Mongolian reflected by this clitic can tell us about the following. First, reflexivity arises, in need of remedying the effect of Inability to Distinguish Indistinguishables (Reuland 2014), from the identity between the subjects of two predicates, one matrix and the other embedded, which is a more general cognitive principle. Second, possessives involve an abstract semantic predicate “x HOLD y”, where x is referentially identical to a matrix subject in deriving possessive anaphors. Third, there are two primary types of reflexivity, namely, possessive reflexivity and situational reflexivity, the former of which includes anaphoric reflexivity as its subtype. Fourth, reflexivity defined in its narrowest sense remains anaphoric reflexivity, which must be anaphoric-marked.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008696 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	reflexivity, reflexive predicate, possessive, anaphor, same-subject, switch reference, mongolian, english, chinese, japanese, typology, semantics, syntax, morphology, semantics, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [December 2024] v1 [December 2024]
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