Semantics and Syntax of Turkish kendisi

Turkish inected anaphor kendisi, despite being labelled a long-distance reexive, displaysvery few of the characteristics traditionally associated with long-distance anaphora: it is notsubject-oriented, monomorphemic or restricted to a particular syntactic domain.(1) Ali Ay³enin kendisine kzmasna ³a³t,Mustafa daAli Ay³e-Gen self.3sg.Dat get.angry-Ger.Dat be.surprised-Aor Mustafa tooAli i was surprised that Ay³e j got angry at him i /herself j /him/her k very muchIn (1) Mustafa could have been surprised by Ay³e's getting angry at either Ali (strict reading),Mustafa (sloppy reading) or someone from the discourse (strict reading).Kornlt (2001) proposes to analyse kendisi, which is an inected form of kendi `self', asan AgrP with a pro as its specier: that way, kendi is locally bound within what we wouldnow have termed the phase, whilst the specier, pro, is free within its own domain (2). As aresult, neither of the relevant binding principles, A or B, is violated.(2) a. [pro [ Agr NP ]]b. [pro [ -si kendi- ]]Whilst this analysis explains the locality conditions on the use of kendisi, it suers fromat least two problems: (i) given the general tendency in the current literature to reducebinding domains to independently motivated locality domains (phases) and the observedCP/DP parallellism, AgrP is not likely to be a phase, and thus cannot ensure the localityconstraints on binding one would wish to relegate to it; (ii) it is not immediately clear howthe non-obligatoriness of bound variable interpretations is to be explained on such a view.In this paper, I shall examine the semantic side of the Turkish data (strict/sloppy readingsin VP-ellipsis contexts, interpretations de re/de se in intensional contexts etc.) anddemonstrate how Kornlt's proposal can be modied to be integrated into more recent workon pronominal semantics (e.g. Elbourne 2005).Indeed, this phrasal analysis reminds immediately of semantic work on the interpretationof anaphora by P. Elbourne, who proposes to treat English pronouns as denite descriptions(3). If syntactic binding is to be reduced to (semantic) binding of a variable by an operator(in Elbourne's case by the lambda-operator created by movement) with binding domainsno longer stipulated but equated with independently motivated phases, one could achievetwo goals simultaneously: (i) restate the binding theory in terms of current minimalist ideas;and (ii) get a better understanding of long-distance anaphora in a crosslinguistic perspective.(3) the g = it g = λf.λs : ∀!xf(λs.x)(s) = 1 . ιxf(λs ′ .x)(s) = 1The lexical entry in (3) above requires that the (or it, for that matter) takes as arguments anNP 〈se,st〉 and a situation with exactly one element satisfying the NP. Thus the entire NP (aswell as the pronoun) denotes that unique individual which satises the NP in that situation.The little snag we hit here is that such an analysis depends crucially on a language havinga denite article. Turkish, however, has no overt denite determiner. To somehow deal withthis problem, I follow Ramchand and Svenonius (2008) Ramchand & Svenonius (2008) inassuming the D-layer to be universal. In languages like Turkish, Russian or Chinese, on sucha theory, there is a zero determiner which converts an NP (i.e. a predicate of type )into an argument of type , whilst the precise nature of this argument (denite, indenite,1

generic, specic, etc.) is determined by the Conceptual-Intensional system (the componentof grammar dealing with meaning).ReferencesElbourne, Paul D. 2005. Situations and individuals. MIT Press.Kornlt, Jaklin. 2001. Local and Long-distance Reexives in Turkish. In Long-distancereexives, ed. Peter Cole, Gabriella Hermon, and James C.-T. Huang, volume 33. AcademicPress.Ramchand, Gillian, and Peter Svenonius. 2008. Mapping a Parochial Lexicon onto a UniversalSemantics. In The limits of syntactic variation, ed. Theresa Biberauer, Linguistik Aktuell(Linguistics Today), 219245. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.2