Trending Bestseller

Locality and Logophoricity

No reviews yet Write a Review
In many languages, reflexives like English herself exhibit a puzzling dual behavior: they must either obey structural constraints or perspective-related discourse constraints. Based on detailed examination of crosslinguistic data, this book proposes a unified solution to this syntax-semantics issue, which has consequences for the theories of binding and logophoricity.
Paperback / softback
408 Pages
04-December-2019
$136.34
Ships in 3-5 business days

Delivery estimate

Hurry up! Current stock:
Locality and Logophoricity investigates what the distribution of pronominal expressions in various languages can tell us about the structure of the human language faculty. The exploration of this question in the past fifty years has led to the development of a general theory of referential dependency, namely Binding Theory. This book focuses on Condition A of this theory, which concerns referentially dependent expressions such as English herself, French elle-même or Mandarin ziji. Specifically, it tackles an issue of apparent ambiguity presented by many of these reflexives across languages: in a large number of unrelated languages, we observe that the same reflexive form must obey either syntactic constraints or discourse constraints related to perspective. The specific aim of the book is to describe and explain this widespread dual behavior of reflexives. A detailed empirical investigation based mainly on systematically collected French, English, Icelandic, Mandarin, and Korean data leads the author to propose a unified solution to this issue. This proposal has consequences both for Binding Theory and for the theory of logophoricity, which addresses the impact of perspective on linguistic systems.
Product Details
ISBN-13
9780190902094
Publisher
Oxford University Press USA
Published
04-December-2019
Format
Paperback / softback
Pages
408

This product hasn't received any reviews yet. Be the first to review this product!

$136.34
Ships in 3-5 business days

Delivery estimate

Hurry up! Current stock:

Locality and Logophoricity

$136.34

Description

Locality and Logophoricity investigates what the distribution of pronominal expressions in various languages can tell us about the structure of the human language faculty. The exploration of this question in the past fifty years has led to the development of a general theory of referential dependency, namely Binding Theory. This book focuses on Condition A of this theory, which concerns referentially dependent expressions such as English herself, French elle-même or Mandarin ziji. Specifically, it tackles an issue of apparent ambiguity presented by many of these reflexives across languages: in a large number of unrelated languages, we observe that the same reflexive form must obey either syntactic constraints or discourse constraints related to perspective. The specific aim of the book is to describe and explain this widespread dual behavior of reflexives. A detailed empirical investigation based mainly on systematically collected French, English, Icelandic, Mandarin, and Korean data leads the author to propose a unified solution to this issue. This proposal has consequences both for Binding Theory and for the theory of logophoricity, which addresses the impact of perspective on linguistic systems.