The Dual Property of Anaphors

Abstract

In this paper we argue that every anaphor has the dual property of a clitic and a quantifier and may in principle be subject to both clitic-climbing as a head at S-Structure or LF and quantifier-raising (QR) as an XP at LF. Clitic-climbing may involve feature-percolation as Kayne (1987) shows. Thus, if we assume that a naphors as clitics only adjoin to functional categories since anaphors belong to the functional category D and that agreement-sensitive anaphors like English himself, which contain the full set of phi-features, induce feature-percolation when they undergo clitic-climbing, whereas agreement-insensitive anaphors like Korean caki, which do not contain the full set of phi-features, do not, then we can account for the language universals on anaphora (1) and (2): (1) An anaphor is subject -oriented when its antecedent occurs outside of the minimal clause containing the anaphor. (2) An agreement -sensitive anaphor (like English himself) obeys the SSC whereas an agreement -insensitive anaphor (like Korean caki) does not. We can also account for the language universal (3) by our hypothesis of anaphoric clitic-climbing: (3) A reciprocal obeys the SSC (3) is due to the fact that a reciprocal is semantically agreement-sensitive whether it is morphologically agreement -sens iti ve or not, in that it requires its antecedent to be plural and in a dis tributive (or reciprocal) dependency relation. We also propose to account for variations in the SSC across languages in terms of possible parameterization of the agreement-sensitive element and/ or its feature-percolating capacity. By motivating the hypothesis that ever y anaphor is a quantifier and undergoes QR as an XP, we can account for the language universals on anaphora (4) and (5): (4) An ana ph or may disobey the NIC only when the language allows movement from the subject position of a tensed clause. (5) An ana ph or is non-subject-oriented just in case it can be adjoined to non-argument XP's under the assumption that it can undergo QR as a quantifier. For example, the English anaphor himself may not disobey the NIC whereas the Korean anaphor caki may, since English does not allow QR (or any movement) from the subject position of a tensed clause due to the ECP whereas Korean does.