A morpho-syntactic approach to pronominal binding

In this paper, I propose that the availability of a bound variable reading for pronouns is predictable from their morphological structure of the pronouns. More specifically I argue that noun-containing pronouns cannot be bound variables. My proposal is different from D&W's (2002) argument in that in their theory, every DPs cannot have a bound variable reading, while in my theory, even DPs can have a bound variable reading as long as they do not contain a noun in it. I show that my proposal has more empirical and conceptual advantages than D&W's (2002) theory through the binding properties of Korean pronouns. I also deal with the cases discussed in D&W (2002) and show that my proposal can explain those data without the additional category phi-P that D&W (2002) suggest. This conference paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/ vol14/iss1/18 U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 14.1, 2008 A Morpho-syntactic Approach to Pronominal Binding Heeshin Koak