Abstract for Jeffrey T. Runner's talk

A preliminary look at the effects of discourse and parallelism on the interpretation of elided reflexives
Jeffrey T. Runner (University of Rochester)
February 6, 2007 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

The main explanations for the exceptional behavior of reflexives in "representational NPs" (RNPs), e.g., 'a picture of herself', rely on syntactic or argument structure (Chomsky, 1986; Davies & Dubinsky, 2003; Pollard & Sag, 1992; Reinhart & Reuland, 1993). "Reference transfer" (RT) allows reference to a representation of a person by that person's name, e.g., referring to a statue of Ringo Starr as 'Ringo Starr' (Jackendoff, 1992). Like RNP reflexives (Grodzinsky & Reinhart, 1993), RT reflexives may receive coreferential interpretations when elided (Lidz, 2001). Here I present evidence from collaborative work with Micah Goldwater (UT Austin) of two picture verification experiments and two eye-tracking experiments suggesting that it is the representational use of RNP reflexives - and not the syntactic/argument structure - that allows for their exceptional behavior. Interesting differences are found between the two sets of experiments, which can shed light on the approaches to ellipsis interpretation discussed by Kehler (2000) and Frazier & Clifton (2006).