May 9, 2024 | 3:30PM
Stuart, Room 105
Please join us at 3:30 pm this coming Thursday (May 9th), in Stuart 105, for our next colloquium talk by Zhiyu Mia Gong, (University of California, Santa Cruz). The title and abstract of Mia's talk are below.
Title: Reflexive Binding and Clausal Nominalization in Khalkha Mongolian
Abstract: Reflexive pronouns vary cross-linguistically in terms of locality, subject orientation, and morphological complexity. Previous studies (e.g., Faltz 1977; Pica 1987; Yang 1983, 1989; Cole and Sung 1994) suggest that complex (poly-morphemic) reflexives typically exhibit local binding, but simplex (mono-morphemic) reflexives can be bound long-distance. Additionally, while local reflexives can be bound by subject or non-subject antecedents, long-distance reflexives predominantly show subject orientation.
Khalkha Mongolian (Mongolic, SOV) presents a typologically special case within this larger context. The language has only complex reflexives, lacking any mono-morphemic forms, and its long-distance reflexives do not exhibit subject orientation. Furthermore, the morphological markers used for reflexive binding in Mongolian also appear on nominalized embedded clauses to indicate coreference between embedded and matrix subjects, superficially resembling a switch-reference system.
This talk examines new empirical data related to the above points and presents an analysis of reflexive binding and subject marking in Mongolian. The main proposals include: (i) Mongolian reflexives structurally resemble possessive DPs. The absence of simplex reflexives is due to the nominal architecture of the language, including the phrasal status of the self-pronoun and the presence of DP; (ii) subject-oriented binding is established within vP; (iii)
the same binding mechanism applies in the nominalized clausal environments. Here, the reflexive binding morphology signals agreement between a nominalizing functional head D and a bound embedded subject. The talk concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of this analysis and a comparative overview with typologically-similar Turkish reflexives (e.g., Kornfilt 2000).