Emphatic Reflexives

some work in this project

1. Ahn, Byron. 2010, September. Syntactic Configurations of Emphatic Reflexives. Talk presented at the workshop on Peculiar Binding Configurations, University of Stuttgart.

   abstract Handout Bib

   Many languages seem to allow reflexive pronouns to function either as arguments (1) or as adjuncts (2). The adjunct-type is called an Emphatic Reflexive (ER).

   (1) a. Kenneth injured himself.
     b. They bought themselves some time.
   (2) a. No boy ate all the Cheezy Blasters himself.
     b. Liz herself grew up in White Haven.

   There are exactly two lexically differentiated ERs:

   • ^vpER, loosely paraphrasable as ‘without help’ (2a)
   • ^dpER, loosely paraphrasable as ‘X, not Y’ (2b)

   Each has its own syntactic configuration, as well as its own felicity conditions that sensitive to:

   • The type of the associate DP, or
   • the argument structure of the predicate.

   The ER reflexive pronoun is bound within a very local domain, even when the associate DP appears rather distant/disjoint

   • ^dpERs adjoin to the DP and may be stranded by A-movement, as was argued for Floated Quantifiers in Sportiche (1988)
   • ^vpERs are right-adjoined in the near-immediate c-command domain of the associate DP’s merge position

   Languages in which ERs do not involve reflexive pronouns (e.g. German) are only minimally different from languages which do (e.g. English)

   • Reflexive pronouns represent a syntactically obligatory, semantically null argument (similar to cases like perjure oneself) of an ER⁰
   • a. German-type: [erP [er⁰ selbst ]]
     b. English-type: [erP [er⁰ Ø ] [DP himself ]]

   @unpublished{Ahn-pbc-er,
     author = {Ahn, Byron},
     howpublished = {Talk presented at the workshop on Peculiar Binding Configurations, University of Stuttgart},
     title = {Syntactic Configurations of Emphatic Reflexives},
     year = {2010}
   }

2. Ahn, Byron. 2010. Not Just Emphatic Reflexives Themselves: Their Prosody, Semantics and Syntax. UCLA dissertation.

   abstract Thesis Bib

   Emphatic Reflexives is the term used to describe the use of reflexive pronouns in an emphatic, adjunct-like way, as in "Sayoko drove to LA herself." Emphatic Reflexives (ERs) have been investigated by many in the course of generative linguistics (Moravcsik 1972, Edmondson and Plank 1978, Browning 1993, Eckardt 2001, Hole 2002, Konig and Gast 2002, Bergeton 2004, Konig and Siemund 2005, and Tavano 2006, to name a few), but past analyses leave some questions inadequately or not at all answered.

   I endeavor to explain as many of the phenomena as possible, focusing on three main points. First, there are exactly two readings of ERs, each with its own felicity conditions, syntactic licensing and semantic properties. Second, ERs are indeed instances of reflexive pronouns that are subject to the Binding Conditions; and though some ERs may appear linearly disjoint from their associate DP, they are always (extremely locally) bound. Thirdly, all ERs are obligatorily contrastively focused under both readings, and they exhibit prosodic properties related to this.

   In making these arguments, I also find evidence for hypotheses that may have broader impact, such as the fact that the Voice head must be the licenser of volitional agents and that the MAE ToBI model of English intonational structure needs modification.

   @mastersthesis{Ahn-MAThesis,
     author = {Ahn, Byron},
     school = {UCLA},
     thesis = {Ahn-MA.pdf},
     title = {Not Just Emphatic Reflexives Themselves: Their Prosody, Semantics and Syntax},
     year = {2010}
   }