Anne Zribi-Hertz

Anaphor Binding and Narrative Point of View: English Reflexive Pronouns in Sentence and Discourse

This paper offers a detailed survey of occurrences of English reflexive pronouns which are marked with respect to the binding theory of Chomskyan generative grammar. Through a large corpus of attested examples found in contemporary nonlinguistic prose, English reflexive pronouns are shown to violate Chomskys Binding Principle A in a productive way. The proposed grammar of these violations draws a clear-cut line between syntax and discourse, and shows Chomskys Binding Principle A to be (a) essentially correct for English if it is clearly defined as a theory of sentence-internal, discourseindependent anaphora; but also (b) crucially incomplete, since it ignores a whole component of the grammar of reflexives and thus fails to account for an open set of data.*

On the dual nature of the `possessive' marker in Modern English

This paper shows, after Watkins (1967) and Tremblay (1989, 1991), that the possessive phrase of This is Johns does not necessarily include an elliptical Possessee. This ambiguity is argued to arise from the dual nature of the possessive marker, which may either be inflectional or derivational in Modern English. In the first case, it may be analysed as a functional head, as proposed by Abney (1987) and Kayne (1993, 1994); in the second case, it operates in the lexicon, deriving possessive adjectives which exhibit complementary morphological and semantic properties in adnominal and predicate positions.

Towards a Modular Theory of Linguistic Deficiency: Evidence From Malagasy Personal Pronouns

This paper examines the personal pronouns of Malagasy in the light of Cardinaletti and Starkes (1994) theory of linguistic deficiency. Malagasy personal pronouns surface either as independent words or as suffixes, two sets of forms which some properties identify as strong and weak, in C & Ss framework. Further investigation, however, reveals that C & Ss strong/weak distinction, framed in terms of the hierarchical projection of functional categories, only partially captures the properties of Malagasy pronouns. What the Malagasy data suggest is that degrees of deficiency should be distinguished from levels of deficiency. Degrees of deficiency involve the relative number of projections which constitute an expression. Levels of deficiency involve different components of linguistic theory. We argue that morphological deficiency, caused by suffixation, is independent from both phonological deficiency (caused by the lack of word-stress) and from syntactic deficiency (caused by the lack of some syntactic projection). Evidence from Malagasy further leads us to conclude, contra C & S, that syntactic deficiency does not necessarily arise from peeling off the topmost projection in a tree structure.