Treating Greek o eaftos mu as a Regular Anaphor: Theoretical Implications

Abstract

Binding theory Condition A must be so formulated as to accommodate the range of behaviors exhibited by anaphors crosslinguistically. In this respect, the behavior of the Modern Greek anaphor o ea‡os mu is theoretically important as it has been reported to display a number of unusual distributional properties, thus leading to treatments by Iatridou (1988) or Anagnostopoulou and Everaert (1999) di‚erent from that of standard anaphors represented by English himself and thus requiring a rethinking of the classic Condition A descriptive generalization and its theoretical derivation. ‘is paper revisits the distribution of this expression documenting €rst that previous discussions are subject to a confound as this expression is not always a reƒexive. Controlling for this confound and relying on new data surveys, we conclude that when anaphoric, o ea‡os mu is in fact a well behaved standard anaphor from the point of view of the standard Condition A (akin to Chomsky 1986). ‘ese surveys support some aspects of the empirical picture presented in Anagnostopoulou and Everaert (1999) but not others. It does support two important conclusions of theirs, namely that this expression cannot be used logophorically and that as nominative subject, it is allowed but in derived subject positions only. ‘is in turn leads to a number of new (theoretical) consequences and predictions: (a) the absence of logophoric usage can be used to determine the domain of application of Condition A independently from the inanimacy criterion used in Charnavel and Sportiche (2016), and yields a picture consistent with its €ndings, (b) the ability of anaphors to function as nominative subjects can be reduced to di‚erences in their internal structure (Greek o ea‡os mu 6= English himself), (c) an inƒuential theoretical innovation made in Anagnostopoulou and Everaert (1999) which takes the reƒexivization mechanism to be self incorporation as a general solution to why self induces reƒexive readings cannot be maintained as a general mechanism underlying anaphor binding in Greek. ∗Email contact: n.angelopouloss1@gmail.com, sportich@g.ucla.edu