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The Secret Life of Pronouns

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The Secret Life of Pronouns THE SECRET LIFE OF PRONOUNS by Liudmila Nikolaeva B.A., Linguistics, Russian State University for the Humanities (2007) Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MASSACHUSMS IM E OF TECHNOLOGY February 2014 FEB 2 7 2014 C 2014 Liudmila Nikolaeva. All rights reserved. 3BRARIES The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature of Author................................................................... Liudmila Nikolaeva February 7, 2014 Certified by........................................................... V David Pesetsky Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modem Languages an Linguistics T esis Supervisor A ccep ted b y ................................................................. ........................ David Pesetsky Head, Department of Linguistics & Philosophy 1 THE SECRET LIFE OF PRONOUNS by Liudmila Nikolaeva Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy on February 7, 2014 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics. ABSTRACT This thesis explores the relationship between anaphora and movement on a wide array of data primarily from Russian. I argue that anaphors and pronominals are underlyingly the same syntactic entity, an index, whereas conditions A and B of binding theory should be substituted by principles regulating the spell-out of an anaphoric element as a reflexive or a pronominal. Through cyclic covert movement of an index, accompanied by cyclic evaluation of its phonological form, I account for the constraints against backward anaphora, or cataphora, found in Russian, as well as subject-orientation of anaphors and anti-subject orientation of the pronominals. The proposal derives the systematic complementarity of distribution of anaphors and pronominals in some contexts, as well as systematic lack thereof in others. Finally, I explore the interaction of anaphora with overt movement, scrambling in particular. I conclude that reconstruction effects correlate with case assignment in the way predicted by Wholesale Late Merger theory. Using this conclusion, I provide an argument in favor of existence of Determiners in Russian. Thesis Supervisor: David Pesetsky Title: Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Head of Department of Linguistics & Philosophy 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. Writing acknowledgments is the hardest part of the thesis: for some reason, the more gratitude I feel for someone, the harder it is to put it to words. Below is my best effort, which is just a bleak and inadequate sketch of what I really feel. I am not an easy person to help. It's been hard for me to learn to accept help, and so I'd like to thank everyone who had courage and patience to help me - I know I did not make it easy for you, and I'm grateful you did anyway. First and foremost, I would like to thank my committee: David Pesetsky, Norvin Richards and Danny Fox. They put in a tremendous amount of time and effort to improve this work in every way, and I am very grateful for all their help. David was my mentor and advisor for the five years that I spent at MIT. I learned a lot from him, in every imaginable way. I'm afraid words are inadequate to express how much I am indebted to him. Advising a rebel like myself is hardly an easy job. David has done it for five years with endless kindness and patience, and has managed to teach me and help me much more than I would believe possible. I would like to thank Norvin. It was a great pleasure to work with him. I am constantly amazed at his ability to understand me before I finish the sentence. He is a wonderful source of knowledge and ideas. His comments are so good they are often humbling, and I am very appreciative of the kindness and sense of humor with which they are delivered. I am very grateful to Danny for many things, but most of all, for providing his unique perspective. I don't think I've ever met anyone whose thinking is so different from my own, and it has not always been easy to understand him, but when I did, it was most rewarding. Danny has been pointing out things that would never occur to me. Working with him, I constantly feel my world expanding. I would like to express my gratitude to my many other teachers at MIT, especially Michael Kenstowicz, Shigeru Miyagawa, Donca Steriade, Irene Heim and Sabine Iatridou. I also wish to thank my friends and colleagues at MIT, especially Natasha Ivlieva, Alexandr Podobryaev, Sam Al Khatib, Marie-Christine Meyer, Rafael Nonato, Jonah Katz, Jessica Coon, lain Giblin and Ayaka Sugawara. My deepest gratitude to Barbara Partee, who advised my senior thesis. I learned a lot from her, from linguistics to research to writing to fighting MS Word. It was a fun, heartfelt and eye- opening experience. She has tremendous patience. Her encouragement and enthusiasm were the reason I decided to apply to graduate program. None of this would be possible without the experience and knowledge I received as an undergraduate at RSUH. I am especially grateful for the Laboratory of Typology and people who make it the unique place it is, especially Jakov Georgievich Testelets, Nina Romanovna 3 Sumbatova and Vera Isaakovna Podlesskaya. They established the foundations and sparked the interest in linguistics that has changed my life. Jakov Georgievich deserves a special thanks. He has played an enormous role in my life. Working with him was an immensely important experience that deeply affected me as a linguist. And I am forever grateful to him for finding right words in the moments I needed them. I owe thanks to all my Russian friends who gave me their support and their judgments, especially Lena Budjanskaja, Liuda Petrakova, Vera Tsukanova and Vera Mal'tseva. Finally, I want to thank my family. My deepest and warmest gratitude to my parents, to whom I owe who I am, and who gave me everything and, most importantly, the freedom to think and choose for myself. My gratitude to my husband Jeremy is beyond words. He has given me more support than I could possibly wish for, he has helped me in every imaginable way, and, most importantly, he believed in me when I didn't. I think it is fair to say, without him, this dissertation would not have happened. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS. C H A PTER 1. IN TR O DU CTIO N ............................................................................................. 8 1.1. REMARK ABOUT JUDGMENTS. ........................................................................................ I C H A PTER 2. PRO N O M INA L RAISIN G ............................................................................ 12 2.1. PROPOSAL...................................................................................................................... 12 2.2. C-COMMAND LIKE YOUR PARENT................................................................................. 14 2.2.1. Do c-com mand:................................................................................................. 14 2.2.2. Do not c-command........................................................................................... 16 2.3. ... BUT NOT LIKE YOUR GRANDPARENT......................................................................... 18 2.4. SPECIFIERS..................................................................................................................... 20 2.5. ANTI-CATAPHORA W ITH R-EXPRESSIONS................................................................... 22 2.6. LOCALITY RESTRICTIONS. ........................................................................................... 26 2.7. LANDING SITE AND REASONS TO MOVE. ...................................................................... 30 2.8. A LTERNATIVE ANALYSES............................................................................................ 32 2.9. D ESPIC 2011 . ................................................................................................................. 33 2.9.1. Specifiers vs. Complements............................................................................... 36 2.9.2. Pronominals vs. R-expressions. .......................................................................... 36 2.10. CONCLUSION.................................................................................................................. 38 CHAPTER 3. WHERE ARE ALL THE PRONOUNS?.......................... ....................... 39 3.1. EMPIRICAL GENERALIZATIONS..................................................................................... 40 3 .1 .1 . R eflex iv es . ............................................................................................................. 4 0 3.1.2. Pronominals...................................................................................................... 43 3 .1 .3 . Su m m ary . .............................................................................................................. 4 4 3.2. THEORIES OF (ANTI)-SUBJECT ORIENTATION................................................................ 45 3.2.1. Parameterization approaches........................................................................... 47 3.2.2. Movem ent-based approaches............................................................................. 50 3.2.3. Competition-based approaches.......................................................................
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