Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 23:44:06 -0400 (EDT)
From: Daniel Seely <ENG_SEELY@EMUVAX.EMICH.EDU>
Subject: Reply to Zlatic from Seely
To: LINCONF@tamvm1.tamu.edu
Message-Id: <01IAUFXYSYF696VN2Q@EMUVAX.EMICH.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <01IATZ2XB7IQ8WZI3F@EMUVAX.EMICH.EDU>
FURTHER COMMENTS TO L. ZLATIC FROM SEELY
Thanks for the reply. I have some follow-up:
COMMENT 1:
In your response to the comments of R. May and myself, you
state that a thematic hierarchy does play a role in the binding of
reflexive elements in Serbian. Thus, with respect to your reply
example (1),
(1) Jovanovo(i) vracanje dece(j) svojim(i, *j)/njihovim(j) roditeljima
John's returning children self's /their parents
'John's returning of the children to his/their parents'
you state:
"In the above example, in which there are two syntactically expressed
arguments of the deverbal nominal, vracanje 'returning', only the
agent argument (i.e. Jovanovo) can be bound by the reflexive
possessive 'svojim'. The theme argument, dece 'children', can only be
bound by the non-reflexive possessive pronoun 'njihovim'."
But the indicated judgements about (1) follow from your analysis since
_John_ is a semantic argument in SPEC of XP, and the reflexive must be
bound by such for you. This looks like a thematic hierarchy effect,
but in fact the hierarchy plays no direct role in your analysis.
In the paper, you give example (2), here repeated
(2) Marija (i) je ubijena u svom (i)/njenom (*i) stanu.
Mary AUX killed in self's / her apartment
'Mary was killed in her apartment.'
to show that it is the grammatical and not the logical subject that
serves as the binder of the reflexive. My question is: What happens
if the agent is expressed in example (2), in the equivalent of the
"by-phrase;" would the reflexive have to be bound by that agent since
it is higher on the hierarchy? If the reflexive must still by bound
by _Mary_ (and we could construct parallel examples for your reply
case (1) above if nominals allow some form of passive); then we have
evidence that the hierarchy is NOT a factor. And then the basic point
still stands: what is relevant for you is the notion "semantic
argument." Given that your characterization of SUBJECT is a
primitive; thematic roles, coargumenthood, and thematic hierarchy (in
short, those notions that we normally associate with a theta account
of binding) are not directly relevant.
COMMENT 2:
One quick point: In your reply, you state that the movement
analysis of reflexives is not tenable since there is no INFL within NP
to which reflexives could move. True enough; but there certainly
could be a functional head of some sort therein. Is there evidence
that there are no functional heads (of the usual sort) within Serbian
NPs?
COMMENT 3:
I'm very interested in your comments about processing in
these examples. Let me try to make a long story short:
I found a distinction similar to yours in some respects. In research
on the binding of plural pronouns, I considered the following contrast:
(a) *Bill said that Mary's frequent description of themselves would
cause trouble
(b) ?Bill said that Mary's photos of themselves would cause trouble.
Here we have a process vs. non-process nominal and the split
bound reflexive in the former is worse than the latter.
The idea was that the non-argument status (in the sense of Grimshaw,
Lyons, Williams) of _Mary's_ in (b) made it invisible to binding.
[As I said there's a much longer story to this but I just
want to get a bit of the data out and make the point.]
For me, the contrast between (a) and (b) is sharp, but speaker
judgements where quite unstable. I did some grammaticality studies
and found that the contrast was "real" but not as sharp as others that
motivate the form of BT. Thus, it seemed to me, too, that processing
factors might well be relevant. But the problem involves the wide
range of possibilities and the task of teasing them apart. It could
be, for instance, that BT rejects both (a) and (b) and "processing
factors" render (b) acceptable in certain circumstances, or that both
are in and (a) rendered unacceptable, etc.
I just want to put this out as a general point of discussion.
However, I'm not sure I fully understand your specific claims about
the processing factors involved in your example (4), here repeated:
(4) Jovan (i) je procitao [Marijin (j) clanak o sebi (i, ?*j)].
John AUX read Mary's-ADJ article about self
'John read Mary's article about herself.'
Your version of BT-A rules (4) out on index _j_; the reflexive would
not be bound by a local SUBJECT. But your processing suggestions in
your reply comments state that the local non-semantic-argument subject
of the containing NP is dispreferred on the grounds that it is
ambiguous. So why should there be any question mark on index _j_ at
all? If both BT and processing factors are working against it; we
might expect it to be really terrible. What you do think?
COMMENT 4:
I think your version of BT predicts that if we embed a
non-process nominal within another one; the reflexive would have to go
up to first SUBJECT. Thus the Serbian counterpart to this sentence
should be good with _self_ bound by _John_.
John liked Mary's review article about Sue's book about self
Is this true?
And finally, I wanted to be sure about another prediction.
In your example (9), given here:
(9) Jovan (i) je procitao [Marijin (j) clanak o njemu (?*i) / njoj (?j)].
John AUX read Mary's-ADJ article about him / her
'John read Mary's article about him/herself.'
the pronoun _njoj_ may be locally bound by _Marijin_ since that
NP is not a SUBJECT (and pronouns must be SUBJECT free). Now the
Binding Category of the pronoun is the entire IP. Thus, _njoj_
should be ungrammatical with index _i_ (since then it
would not be SUBJECT free). Is this true?
Thank you for your comments on these issues!
--Daniel Seely