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Event Detail Information

Event Detail Information

Linguistics seminar by ILLS speaker, Prof. Paul Kiparsky (Stanford University). "Greek Anaphora in Cross-Linguistic Perspective."

Date Apr 12, 2012
Time 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm  
Location Lucy Ellis Lounge (1080 Foreign Languages Building)
Sponsor Department of Linguistics.
Event type seminar
Views 1660
Originating Calendar Linguistics Event Calendar

The Homeric and Classical Greek systems of referentially dependent pronouns support an approach to binding and anaphoric reference which characterizes pronouns by two crossclassifying features, which specify the maximal domain in which their antecedent must be located, and whether they can overlap in reference with a coargument (Kiparsky 2002). By treating reflexivity as a special case of referential dependency, this approach predicts a class of referentially dependent non-reflexive anaphors, or DISCOURSE ANAPHORS, whose characteristic is that they need not have a structural antecedent but can serve as reflexives in contexts where a dedicated reflexive is unavailable. This class is instantiated in the Greek clitic anaphors ἑο, ἑ, οἱ, μιν. It also predicts a class of reflexive pronouns which must be disjoint in reference from a coargument, attested in Homeric Greek as the bare reflexive ἕ-. Greek also gives some support to the BLOCKING principle, which dictates the use of the most restricted pronoun available in a given context. The proposal is compared to the well-known theory of Reinhart & Reuland (1993) on the basis of Greek as well as Germanic (Swedish, German, Dutch, Frisian, Old English), and is shown to provide a better answer to the challenge raised by Evans & Levinson (2009).