(1)a. Johni-i Billj-ekey Maryk-ka cakii/j/k-lul cohahanta-ko malhayssta John-NOM Bill-DAT Mary-NOM self-ACC like-COMPL told Johni told Billj that Maryk likes selfi/j/k.¹ b. Johni-un ttal-i cakii-pota ki-ka te kuta John-TOP daughter-NOM self-than height-NOM more {is tall} As for Johni, (his) daughter is taller than selfi.¹
On the other hand, (2) illustrates an exchange between two speakers A and B. In B¹s utterance Caki occurs without an overt sentence internal antecedent.
(2) A: Mary-ka Ku pati-e kass-ni anim tarun salam-i taysin kass-ni? Mary-NOM the party-to went-Q or other person-NOM instead went-Q Is it Mary who went to the party or somebody else instead?¹ B: Ani, caki -ka kasse No, self-NOM went: No, self went¹In order to account for this distribution without making reference to the alleged ability of caki to refer directly to the discourse context we propose that caki -binding is very closely related to topicalised constructions which in turn, as we argue, are closely related to the null topic constructions and share the same underlying structure with double nominative constructions (3)
(3)a. John-i/un ton-i issta John-NOM/TOP money-NOM exist: John has money¹We argue that the binder for caki in (2) is not a topic in discourse, but actually an unrealised topic which originates in the outermost nominative position in an underlyingly multiple nominative structure, in other words the topic that binds caki in these instances is always in an A-position. The central evidence for this approach is twofold, syntactically it comes from the otherwise unexplained fact that caki can never be topic-marked itself which suggests that with the topic position already filled, had caki been topicalised, there would be no available position for its antecedent as in (4) (notice that Korean restricts the number of topics per sentence to one).
(4) * Caki-nun kasse Self-TOP went: Self went¹Semantically on the other hand we observe that the topic antecedent of caki must be in a certain kind of relation with the nominative-marked element in the sentence in order for the binding of caki to be licensed. The relations in question are precisely the ones of possession, inalienable possession, part- whole, identity, and few others which are precisely (and only) the ones that must hold between the outer and inner nominative in a double nominative construction. It then follows that topic-binding of caki can only occur in a double nominative construction. Also, given that these relations must hold in double nominative constructions, the ungrammaticality of cases where a topic phrase inappropriately occurs, predicting wrong binding patterns as in (5), is immediately explained away with no further stipulation:
(5) *John-un Bill-i ku chayk-ul caki-ekey cwuessta John-TOP Bill-NOM the book-ACC self-DAT gave *As for John, Bill gave the book to self.¹In the last part of the paper we attempt to apply the same reasoning to languages such as Dutch and Icelandic which present in a sense minimal variation as they show long distance anaphora and allow transitive expletive constructions (a version of the Japanese/Korean double nominative construction). In conclusion, we have shown that a particular interaction of seemingly unrelated properties of the grammar of certain languages neatly explains the common patterns of anaphora, which in turn seem to need no extra stipulations in order to be explained away.
About the PLC23 Committee
Previously held Penn Linguistics Colloquium: PLC22 (1998), PLC21 (1997)
Penn Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania