Probes, Pronouns and Binding in the Minimalist Program - Paperback

by Fredrik Heinat (Author)

This book investigates the syntactic restrictions that determine the distribution of pronouns and reflexives. The book deals with three main topics: the nature of probes; the internal structure of pronouns and reflexives; and the interplay of syntactic features. It is argued that not only heads, but also phrases are involved in initiating the processes of agreement. The author shows that pronouns and reflexives have different internal structure, and as a consequence pronominal and reflexive DPs have different feature values. It is shown that the agreement process that take place between antecedent and pronoun/reflexive is no different from that of other syntactic agreement relations. The analysis is formulated in the framework of Distributed Morphology and a phase based syntax and makes use of notions such as feature chains and valued and unvalued features.