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20. Conclusion
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20 Conclusion As the quotations in (2) of chapter 3 indicate, it has been widely assumed that determining the ϕ-feature values of pronominals is essentially trivial. Syntactically , the main approach has been to say that a pronominal agrees with its antecedent, when it has one. But the material we have gone over in this book shows that determining pronominal ϕ-feature values is actually a complex matter involving a number of different principles. We have argued for condition (1). (1) The Pronominal Agreement Condition If P is a pronominal not inherently valued for ϕ-feature F, then P agrees in F with a source. This condition involves multiple innovations compared with previous accounts of pronominal agreement. First, it mentions the concept of source, which includes the important difference between primary and secondary sources developed in chapter 13. Second, source is defined in terms that involve the primitive antecedence relation, built into the concept of primary source. Third, (1) permits pronominal agreement to be specific to particular ϕ-features (see chapter14).Fourth,itallowspronominalstohaveinherentfeaturespecifications (see chapter 17). Unpacking these notions and stating other related constraints (such as the Homogeneity Principle of chapters 12 and 17) has occupied much of this book. In a parallel way, grammarians have widely assumed that person assignment to coordinate DPs is governed by the elementary principle we called the basic law (see (1) of chapter 9 and following citations). But as we showed at length in that chapter with respect to coordinate DPs with imposter and camouflage DP conjuncts, a much richer account also appealing to our recursive notion of source is actually required to deal viably with the much more complex pattern of coordinate agreement in these cases. Furthermore, we suggested in (26) of 230 Chapter 20 chapter 14 that it is even possible to unify the pronominal and coordinate agreement conditions. What have been commonly assumed to be essentially trivial conditions on pronominal and coordinate agreement have taken us hundreds of pages to describe. That fact supports the view we advanced in the preface that the description of English syntax is not only nowhere near completion but in many respects is just beginning. If so, a fortiori, no description of any other language is much beyond its initial stages either.1 In this book, we have attempted to construct a syntactic account of pronominal alternations involving imposters and camouflage DPs such as the following: (2) a. The present authors will attempt to defend ourselves/themselves. b. Your Majesty should praise yourself/herself. c. Daddy and your uncle are proud of ourselves/themselves. Our approach rather deeply conflicts with a recurrent view, which even has a traditional name, syllepsis (see note 1 of chapter 13). Such a view describes the alternations in (2) as representing a choice between purely syntactic agreement and some kind of agreement based on semantic interpretation. For example, in (2a) themselves agrees with its immediate antecedent, whereas ourselves is permitted because its denotation includes the speaker. The conflict between these two views represents a complex theoretical debate on the boundaries between syntax and semantics, which we have in no sense addressed here. What we have done is to give an existence proof that for a wide range of cases a syntactic agreement approach is possible. Moreover, we have displayed a massive amount of intricate data that any approach must account for. While we have offered no formal semantic theory of our syntactic framework , we believe that the data, generalizations, and syntactic mechanisms we have presented place important boundary conditions on any eventually successful semantic theory of pronominal anaphora. We list these boundary conditions here. First, all pronominal ϕ-feature values (with the exception of the inherent values like the plural found in expressions like singular they and nurse we) are the result of agreement with sources. The presuppositional approach to pronominal ϕ-features is then arguably incorrect. Notably, it fails even for inherent feature values (since nurse we can denote single addressees as well as multiple ones). Second, as a consequence of the previous point, 1st person pronouns such as I and me do not have inherent ϕ-feature values that trigger presuppositions on the mapping of these pronouns to elements of the domain by an assignment [34.229.223.223] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:31 GMT) Conclusion 231 function. Rather, given the first point, there is arguably a null constant AUTHOR in the sentence with which I and me agree (see Ross 1970; Baker 2008). AUTHOR is not a pronoun, hence not assigned a value...