A cross-linguistic investigation of pronouns and reflexives: Experiments on picture NPs in English and beyond

In this talk, I present a series of cross-linguistic experiments that investigate the interpretation of different anaphoric forms in representational noun phrases (e.g., picture NPs such as picture of her/herself). I’ll present psycholinguistic data from three Germanic languages, namely English, Dutch, German, as well as results from Finnish, a non-Indo-European language. Broadly speaking, these studies use psycholinguistic methods to test whether and how the interpretation of anaphors in representational NPs (RNPs) is guided by structural and semantic information, and thereby contribute to our understanding of how syntactic and semantic information are integrated during language processing. By looking at multiple languages, we can shed light on the source/nature of these effects. In many structural environments, pronouns and reflexives are in (nearly) complementary distribution, ex.(1). Principles A and B of traditional Binding Theory (e.g., Chomsky 1981) provide a structural account of this. However, it is well-known that the complementarity breaks down in certain environments, e.g. representational/picture NPs, ex.(2) (e.g. Jackendoff 1972, Chomsky 1986, Williams 1987, Reinhart & Reuland 1993, Tenny 2004). Here, both her and herself can refer to the subject.