Abstract for Anastasia Conroy's talk

The Personal Dative in Appalachian English as a Reflexive Pronoun
Anastasia Conroy (University of Maryland)
April 1, 2008 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

In this paper, we investigate the Personal Dative construction found in Appalachian English and Southern American English. In this construction, a pronoun is permitted to be coreferential with a local antecedent. We argue that the pronouns in the Personal Dative construction are a type of anaphor, despite their phonological similarity to full pronouns. We analyze the Personal Dative in light of the approach to SE anaphors taken by Reuland (2001), suggesting these are bound pronouns that do not take a theta role. This work suggests that the Personal Dative construction is not unique, but is another instance of a phenomenon found cross-linguistically.