This week: more on pronouns

Following up on last week's discussion, we will start the week with an exploration of the meanings of pronominal features and the typology of pronominal paradigms.

If you want to read more: I just finished the final version of my paper "Making a Pronoun. Fake Indexicals as Windows into the Properties of Pronouns". The paper will be published in Linguistic Inquiry. The meaning of pronominal features is discussed in section 5. Here is the abstract:

Using local and long-distance fake indexicals as guides, this paper argues that natural languages have two binding strategies that create two types of bound variable pronouns. Bound variable pronouns of the first type, which include local fake indexicals, reflexives, relative pronouns, and PRO may be born with a ‘defective’ set of features. They can acquire the features they are missing (if any) from verbal functional heads that carry standard λ-operators that bind them. Bound variable pronouns of the second type, which include long-distance fake indexicals, are born fully specified and receive their interpretations via context shifting λ-operators of the kind proposed in Cable (2005). Both binding strategies are freely available and not submitted to syntactic constraints.  Local anaphora emerge under the assumption that feature transmission and morphophonological spellout are limited to small windows of operation, possibly the phases of Chomsky (2001). If pronouns can be born underspecified, we need a principled account of what the possible initial features of a pronoun can be and how it acquires the features it may be missing. The paper develops such an account by deriving a space of possible paradigms for referential and bound variable pronouns from a typologically motivated semantics for pronominal features. The result is a comprehensive theory of pronouns that predicts the typology and individual characteristics of both referential and bound variable pronouns.