Publication details
Bound Variables, Person Constraints, and Distributivity in Czech: An experimental study
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The pattern of anaphoric binding in Slavic languages is very intricate and underivable from the standard Binding Theory (Chomsky (1981) and subsequent work). Specifically, we have studied what we call “non-reflexivisation”: the occurrence of non-reflexive possessives in a local binding scenario in Czech, which is unexpected by Chomsky’s Binding Principles. We ran two experiments on separate samples of native speakers of Czech. They judged the acceptability of sentences on a scale from 1 (unacceptable) to 5 (acceptable). Both experiments were of the 2×2 factorial design, sharing the factor of +/- reflexivity, which meant that sentences either contained a reflexive or a non-reflexive possessive bound within a plural antecedent’s domain, and differing in the other factor. Experiment A (N = 67) additionally examined how the factor of overt collectivity/distributivity affects native speakers’ intuitions about the acceptability of both types of possessives. With collectivity, we expected higher ratings for non-reflexive possessives than reflexive ones, but for the distributive items the opposite. Experiment B (N = 65) used the first/third person as the second factor to test whether the acceptability of non-/reflexive binding is affected by person. We hypothesised that in the first person context, non-reflexives would be more accepted than reflexives. The hypotheses were confirmed. Our study provides new data on Czech binding in plural contexts and comes to the following conclusions. Firstly, non-reflexive possessives are preferred to reflexive ones for in-domain binding, but secondly, the first does not stand if the antecedent is in the third person or if the sentence’s proposition is overtly distributive. It follows that Czech binding patterns cannot be accounted for by traditional binding theory, which does not take grammatical person or the difference between collective and distributive interpretations into account. |
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