Possessive Anaphora

Abstract. The starting point of this paper is the apparent semantic symmetry between English and French pairs of examples like The name Mary, uses is not hers,/The name Mary, uses is not her, own and Le nom que Mariei utilise n est pas a ellezLe nom que Mariez utilise n'est pas le sienz. I will argue that this first-glance equivalence is misleading. In English, the possessive complement of a copular construction is ambiguous between a narrowly "possessive" reading and an elliptical relational reading. The former translates into French as a + DP, and the latter as le mienltienlsien... In both languages, the possessive predicate includes no empty nominal. English elliptical possessive DPs may include the adjunct own (his own [e]), an option which has no counterpart in French. I argue that all the interpretive features of the possessive expressions in the sentences at hand are rooted in their morphological or syntactic properties. Even logophoricity is a semantic effect of some formal properties of complex expressions of the him+self type.