English Reflexives as LF-Affixes

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to account for the binding properties of English anaphors within the Minimalist Theory (Chomsky 1992). We assume that anaphors have defective referential features to be checked off. These defective referential features of anaphors are checked off by AGRs which share all the features with NPs in SPEC of AGRsP. We also assume that anaphors are LF-affixes, being affixed to predicates which take them as their arguments. When an anaphor is affixed to its predicate, for example, V, anaphor+V moves to AGRs to get phi-features and tense features of V checked off. In this position, the anaphor gets its defective referential feature checked by AGR. In this way, the process of binding is captured by the defective referential feature checking. By assuming that anaphors with defective referential features are LF-affixes, we can subsume English anaphora under the Principle of Full Interpretation and Economy without any other independent condition for anaphors.