Long-Distance Reflexives in Norwegian
Long-Distance Reflexives in Norwegian Tania E. Strahan Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2001 Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics The University of Melbourne Australia Abstract Despite the work of linguists such as Thrainsson, Sigurðsson, Pollard, Sag, Popowich and Kuno, among others, the analysis and explanation of long-distance reflexives (LDRs) continues to be carried out primarily in the field of syntax. A major goal of this thesis is to show that, in Norwegian, both reflexives with local antecedents and reflexives with non-local antecedents obey the same general constraints. These constraints are based upon a confluence of factors including the semantic features of reflexives as opposed to pronouns, syntactic features such as clause structure, prosodic features such as intonation, discourse features such as perspective and pragmatic information such as conversational implicature. A review of the literature on long-distance reflexives reveals several problems with syntactic approaches, the greatest problem being that they are based upon typological tendencies. Because of this, there are exceptions to nearly every analysis. The notions of finite tense, perspective, factivity and logophoricity are relevant to the description and generation of long-distance reflexives in Norwegian, but not exhaustively so. A major contribution of this thesis to the body of literature available on long-distance reflexives is the presentation of new data. Grammaticality judgements were collected from 180 native speakers of Norwegian on sentence frames which are often used as the basis for arguments in the LDR literature. In addition, 27 speakers completed an oral elicitation exercise, where 6 speakers used LDR.
[Show full text]