Imposters: A Study of Pronominal Agreement

5. The Structure of Imposters

5 The Structure of Imposters 5.1 Imposters as Anteceded Lexical DPs In chapter 3, we showed that under a variety of conditions, an imposter can determine non–3rd person pronominal agreement. This is a priori surprising, since with the exception of examples like yours truly, the imposters studied in this book invariably have the form of regular 3rd person DPs. Following the Syntactic View outlined in chapter 2, we approach the ambivalent behavior of imposters via the idea that while in most cases they appear to be identical to nonimposter DPs (French bibi and yours truly being exceptions), their syntactic structures nonetheless differ sharply from those of nonimposter 3rd person DPs. Despite their nonpronominal morphological form, we suggest that there is a sense (elaborated below) in which imposters are pronominal. The key grammatical property providing imposters with that character is that like nonexpletive pronominals, they have antecedents. Specifically, 1st person imposters have AUTHOR as their ultimate antecedent, and 2nd person ones have ADDRESSEE . Our claim is that recognition of (non–3rd person) antecedents for imposters can permit an account of both their 3rd person and their non–3rd person properties. Theideathatsuperficiallynonpronominal,lexicalDPscanhaveapronominal character is hardly novel here. For instance, Lasnik (1989, 157–162) posits that epithet DPs (e.g., that fool) manifest the feature values defining both pronominals and so-called referring expressions (we return to Lasnik’s analysis of epithets in chapter 11). Associating the antecedence property with imposters immediately provides a syntactic differentiation between imposter and nonimposter DPs even when these are morphologically identical (e.g., this reporter). And that syntactic difference already receives a certain initial support from the documentation in earlierchaptersthatdespitetheir3rdpersonforms,imposterscandeterminepronominal agreement in ways partially parallel to 1st and 2nd person pronominals. 48 Chapter 5 That is, under the hypothesis that imposters have antecedents, we make this claim: (1) a. 1st person imposters share the possibility of being antecedents of 1st person pronominals for the same reason that standard 1st person pronominals do, namely, both have AUTHOR as their ultimate antecedent. b. 2nd person imposters share the possibility of being antecedents of 2nd person pronominals for the same reason that standard 2nd person pronominals do, namely, both have ADDRESSEE as their ultimate antecedent. 5.2 Imposter Precursors A further (indirect) basis for the claim that imposters are anteceded, one offering key clues about the syntactic structure of imposters, lies in the existence of expressions like those italicized in (2). (2) a. I, Nixon, am going to get even. b. We, the present writers, disagree with the following points. c. We, the undersigned, propose a number of improvements. d. I, your faithful correspondent, should write more often. e. You, Madam, should not try to deceive us.1 f. You, my lord, can certainly win the tournament. These arguably appositive structures, containing DPs that we take to be predicate nominals, manifest striking resemblances to imposters, as illustrated by the parallelisms between the respective elements of (2) and (3). (3) a. Nixon is going to get even. b. The present writers disagree with the following points. c. The undersigned propose a number of improvements. d. Your faithful correspondent should write more often. e. Madam should not try to deceive us. f. My lord can certainly win the tournament. The former, which we henceforth refer to as (imposter) precursors, arguably provide all the syntactic and semantic elements needed to compose an imposter. While in many cases precursor-imposter relations are quite systematic, as with (2) and (3), later we will consider instances (e.g., this reporter) where the relations are less regular. But in general, precursor structures appear to provide the correct semantics for imposters. That is, imposters have non–3rd person denotations,andcorrespondingprecursorshavevisiblepronominalcomponents The Structure of Imposters 49 with the right non–3rd person denotations. So each imposter in (3) is equivalent in denotation to its corresponding precursor in (2). Moreover, imposters have a 3rd person lexical component that matches the predicate nominal of the corresponding precursor. And the nonrestrictive meaning provided by the precursor predicate nominal seems to represent as well the meaning of the 3rd person component of an imposter. The major reason why we take precursors to support the view that imposters have antecedents is that in our view, imposters represent syntactic deformations of precursors (in a sense to be made explicit). For example, we treat the imposter Nixon as a deformation of I, Nixon and the imposter Madam as a deformation...