The Grammar of Binding: A study with reference to Russian

Abstract

This thesis is a study of syntactic constraints on the distribution and interpretation of the Russian reflexive pronouns sebja and svoj. These are usually, but, importantly, not always subject-oriented and in complementary distribution with pronominals, and in certain conditions they trigger some hitherto poorly studied interpretive effects. Russian also demonstrates considerable versatility in binding of NP-internal reflexives, including possessives. An explanatory account of the patterns in question, which canonical Binding Theory of Chomsky (1981) has been unable to provide, is offered. The proposed account assumes no features or principles specific to the reflexives. They are taken to realize bundles of derivationally valued interpretable phi-feature that enter into feature sharing dependencies with the antecedents, which encodes binding. In Chapter 2 constraints on the Agree operation are discussed and refined. It is concluded that they must apply to every feature and each direction of valuation independently. An unvalued feature instance can only receive its value from the closest matching relation, but itself can value multiple feature instances. Thus, Agree is supposed to be subject to relativized rather than absolute locality. Unlike in other Agree-based approaches to syntactic anaphora, in this thesis it is assumed that different phi-features (specifically person and number) can be shared separately, and either of them can support an anaphoric dependency. This is made possible by defective phi-feature probes, most importantly a number probe consistently positioned immediately above every complete argument structure. Anaphoric dependencies based on different phi-features have different interpretive properties: person sharing encodes awareness effects, while number sharing yields a distributive interpretation. This also has implications for the possibility of inanimate antecedents in various configurations. Possibly because the Russian reflexives can only be partially valued and thus cannot be spelled out as fully specified personal pronouns, they never realize derivationally acquired phi-feature values morphologically. It is well known that across languages long-distance reflexives tend to be more strictly subject-oriented than local ones. In Russian this holds even if locality is understood in the relative sense.Except PRO, only antecedents that trigger overt agreement can bind reflexives across closer non-nominative potential antecedents. The latter can only enter into number dependencies and don't prevent a person dependency across them, which explains this pattern. The complementary distribution of reflexives and pronominals as an effect of Agree holds for every alternating derivation separately, so if the derivations don't converge on the same antecedent, their superposition may result in apparent non-complementarity. This presents a challenge to global competition approaches to pronominal distribution. Where pronominals are not ruled out by the effects of the Agree operation in Russian, it becomes possible to detect that they can only be bound in configurations that are not too local. Among other issues considered in this thesis are certain differences in binding of dependents of process and result nominals, which correlate with their NP-internal movement possibilities, as well as binding into higher circumstantial PPs and comparative adverbs, which appear accessible only to number dependencies.