Linguistics Seminar Talk - Dominique Sportiche

Seminar Title: On self.

Abstract: Elements like self  (même in French) following a pronoun (e.g. it self, elle même) yields an anaphor in English (and French) in other languages as well, subject to a locality requirement. How? And why does this locality requirement take the form of Condition A of the Binding Theory? And why is there a Condition A at all? And why are such forms also used as intensifiers (not only in English and French but in many languages), apparently without a reflexive reading but with distinct  distributional restrictions and interpretations (cf. e.g. Eckardt 2002, Gast 2006, Ahn 2010)? In addition, English self and cognates in other languages (but not même) can be prefixed to predicates (e.g., self-identify) with correlated interpretive effects. How do these arise?
Proposals in the classical paradigm, e.g., Chomsky  1986 or Charnavel and Sportiche 2016,  do not address, or provide answers to, these questions. Alternatives (Cresswell 1973, Reuland 2011, Lechner 2012, Sauerland 2013) do try to address some of these questions but will be shown to be unsatisfactory. Yet hopefully, answers should fall out from the architecture of syntactic theory, in particular how Condition A comes about, and from the intrinsic properties of such elements (as  it self).
I will sketch a proposal attempting to answer these questions, in part at least. Its central idea is that when accompanying a pronoun y, selfis a binary predicate with two arguments x and the pronoun y, and, as standard, a (quasi) identity function on its first argument (self(y)=y). Relativizing x yields intensification; Moving it to a theta position yields reflexivization.