12h00
Salle/room 124
As is well known, pronouns and anaphors differ in syntactic distribution. It is less clear whether they also differ in their interpretive possibilities. Setting aside deictic uses, pronouns permit both a coreferential (strict) and a bound-variable (sloppy) reading, which can readily be distinguished in VP ellipsis and only-focus constructions (e.g., Only John likes his car meaning either that ‘Nobody else likes their own car’ (sloppy) or ‘Nobody else likes John’s car’ (strict)). Anaphors, by contrast, have traditionally been argued to permit only a bound-variable interpretation (e.g., Chomsky 1981; Reinhart 1983; Lebeaux 1985). However, this neat distinction has been challenged over the years (e.g., Sag 1976; Fiengo and May 1994; Hestvik 1995, Büring 2005; Sportiche 2014). Taken together, these studies suggest considerable variability in the acceptability of strict readings of anaphors across speakers, anaphor types, predicate types, syntactic constructions, and pragmatic contexts. Despite this variability, experimental research on the topic remains scarce. Typological studies have identified substantial crosslinguistic variation in morphological composition of anaphors. In this talk I report the design and results of two experiments investigating the interpretation of two types of reflexive anaphors: complex anaphors in Hebrew and se anaphors in Spanish. The experiments aim to establish their default or preferred interpretation, if any, in basic contexts that do not introduce factors likely to influence interpretation. Specifically, using only-focus constructions, we examine how these anaphors are interpreted in comparison with pronouns and whether complex and se anaphors differ in their interpretation. I propose an analysis of the patterns that emerge for both types.
