TOWARD A THEORY OF LONG DISTANCE ANAPHORS: a GB approach

It has already been long observed that anaphoric elements in different languages pattern in at least two different ways. On the one hand there are languages like English, where anaphors (e.g. himself, themselves, each other ...) obey a locality condition; i.e. an English anaphor can pick up its antecedent in a limited domain, but the syntactic role of the antecedent can vary. Let us call this kind of anaphors "strict" anaphors. On the other hand, there are languages such äs Latin, Japanese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Malayalam etc. where there exist anaphors which do not obey the locality constraint and can take an antecedent in an apparently unlimited domain; however in this case, the syntactic, better to say, thematic role of the antecedent is narrowly specified in the interpretative condition, i.e. it has generally to be a subject. We shall refer to this kind of anaphors äs 'long distance" anaphors. In this paper we shall basically analyze the behavior of the Italian possessive elementpwpno. First we will demonstrate that it is an anaphor, äs opposed to a pronoun, and then we will show that it displays properties of both types of anaphors. The Italian anaphoric system, in fact, appears to be a mixed one, äs can be shown by analyzing the behavior of the two third person singular/plural anaphors: se and se stesso. The data show that se stesso patterns like an English anaphor, i.e. it obey s the locality condition of st riet anaphors; se behaves äs a long distance anaphor. Proprio, being the possessive element corresponding both to se stesso and se, seems to inherit the characteristics of both types of anaphors. However the aün of this work is not only a descriptive one, since our purpose is to give a theoretical account of the behavior of long distance anaphors in general. Our theory can also give an explanation for some data of English anaphors, which cannot be accounted for by a theory of strict anaphors and which went unexplained andevenunnoticedinprevious