Focus on reflexive anaphors

Abstract

Focus related phenomena have long been used to draw conclusions about the syntax and semantics of anaphora. I use examples in which focus is the result of information-structural considerations to argue for a semantics of reflexive anaphors. I show that a theory that treats reflexive anaphors as reflexivizing functions is empirically superior to theories that interpret them like variables. The discussion also leads to some interesting conclusions about focus theory. It is argued that the domain of application of the relevant information-structural notion should be limited to verb phrases and sentences and that the relevant economy condition should be localized accordingly.

Presupposed ignorance and exhaustification: how scalar implicatures and presuppositions interact

“…26 Unfortunately the facts are not as simple as one might expect. Certain presuppositions, especially those triggered by phi-features, seem to not project universally through only (Spathas 2010;Jacobson 2012;Sudo 2012;Sauerland 2013). For instance, the uniqueness presupposition of the singular definite in (i) does not.…”

Dependent plural pronouns with Skolemized choice functions

“…Although I need to abstain from detailed discussion of such sentences in this paper, I would like to mention that recent studies such as Cable (2005), Spathas (2010), Jacobson (2012), Sauerland (2013), and Sudo (2012) demonstrate that these sentences are amenable to alternative accounts that do not postulate minimal pronouns and Feature Transmission (see also Maier 2009). Together with the proposals of the present paper, therefore, these theories might provide us with a different, semantically more transparent way of looking at the semantics of phi-features than the Minimal Pronoun Account.…”

Reflexive anaphors and association with focus

“…As discussed in section 2.1, QA-pairs are subject to the Focus Principle, which is satisfied in (39) and (40) if reflexive anaphors are arity reducers, as suggested in (4a) (Spathas 2010(Spathas , 2011 Given exhaustification, the answer in both (39) and (40), which denotes the proposition that Zelda praised Zelda is a complete answer. In the case of (39), the answer determines that it is true that Zelda praised Zelda and false that Oscar praised Zelda and Lucie praised Zelda.…”

“…Roberts 1996Roberts , 2004 My argument is based on the distribution of the alternatives generated by narrow focus on reflexive anaphors in English. Spathas (2010Spathas ( , 2011 observes that narrow focus on a reflexive anaphor is licensed in two rather different environments (see also Ahn 2012). For example, in the Question-Answer (QA) pairs in (2) and (3), the same sentence with the same intonational contour is used to answer both an object wh-question as in (2), as well as a subject wh-question as in (3).…”

“…We refer to alternatives of the form Zelda praised x as Object Alternatives (OA) and to alternatives of the form x praised Zelda as Subject Alternatives (SA). As Spathas (2010Spathas ( , 2011 argues, the existence of SA forces a treatment of reflexive anaphors in terms of reflexivizing functions (as done mostly in the Categorial Grammar literature), as in (4a), rather than designated bound variables. Assuming (4a), a focused reflexive anaphor contrasts with other argument reducing operations like passivization and anti-passivization.…”