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Part of
Interfaces in Grammar
Edited by Jianhua Hu and Haihua Pan
[Language Faculty and Beyond 15] 2019
► pp. 101–132

Chapter 5
Causality, comitativity, contrastivity, and selfhood

A view from the left periphery and the vP periphery

| National Tsing Hua University

When people talk about reflexives, they often think of two arguments in an anaphoric or coargumental relationship. This paper sets out to show that reflexive adverbials also participate in such kind of relationship, but with a far greater range of interpretative possibilities closely associated with their syntactic distributions. The syntax-semantics correspondence strictly observes an inner-outer dichotomy of adverbials observed across languages, i.e., inner Self expresses comitativity, whereas outer Self express causality. Our finding thus lends a substantial support to the cartographic approach advocated by Rizzi (1997) and Cinque (1999). It is also argued that this behavior can be accommodated by a general theory of reflexivity along the line of Reinhart & Reuland (1993), given that a contrastive focus is introduced in accordance with the phase edges (Chomsky 2000, 2001). The “selfhood” can then be understood in a new light, not only in terms of the general theory of syntax-semantics mapping, but also in terms of the “topography” of adverbials, which is by and large determined by their morphological makeups in particular languages.

Article outline
  • 0.Introduction
  • 1.The delimiting factors
    • 1.1Modals
    • 1.2Negation
    • 1.3Adverbs of quantification
    • 1.4Control verbs
  • 2.Subject agentivity
  • 3.Reflexives of nature
  • 4.A working hypothesis
    • 4.1Inner self as a focus adverb
    • 4.2Comitativity and subject agentivity
    • 4.3Contrastive focus and inner self
  • 5.Outer adverbial ziji as a focus adverb
    • 5.1Inner self and inner how
    • 5.2Outer self and outer how
    • 5.3Causality and reflexives of nature
    • 5.4Anti-causal readings revisited
  • 6.Further consequences
    • 6.1Inner-outer dichotomy in compounding
    • 6.2Relating anaphors to reflexive adverbials
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.15.05tsa
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