LingLunch : Anna Volkova

Anna Volkova (Utrecht)
Reflexivity in Meadow Mari: Binding and Agree

According to the Binding Theory of Chomsky (1981) anaphors must be bound in their local domain and pronominals must be free. The discovery of `long-distance anaphors' (e.g. Thrainsson 1976, Giorgi 1984), which violate the locality condition, induced the search for independent criteria. Giorgi (1984: 310) proposed a widely adopted criterion: `pronouns can have split antecedents and anaphors cannot'. Recent minimalist binding theories derive this property of anaphors from the way a dependency on the antecedent is established which makes it intrinsic to binding. However, this leads to an important problem, since some languages have elements that i) may be locally bound; and ii) allow split antecedents (e.g. Japanese and Korean, Katada 1991, Kasai 2000). In this paper I analyze the data of another such language, namely Meadow Mari (Uralic) and show how such facts can be accounted for within a modular approach to binding (see Reuland 2011).