Perspective is syntactic: evidence from anaphora

Abstract

This paper argues that grammatical perspective, expressed along the spatio-temporal and mental dimensions, has a syntactic component. Evidence for this is provided from non-local anaphora in the Dravidian language Tamil which is perspective-driven: i.e. the antecedent of a successfully bound anaphor in Tamil must denote a mental or spatio-temporal perspective-holder toward some predication containing this anaphor. I will argue that, in Tamil, the agreement marking that obtains on the clausemate verb of the anaphor, when this anaphor occurs in nominative case, seems to be anomalously triggered, not by the anaphor or by its antecedent, but by a silent perspectival pronoun local to the verb. Assuming that agreement is a morphosyntactic process, such a thesis, if correct, then entails that perspective must be syntactically (i.e. structurally and featurally) instantiated. Based on such evidence, I propose that perspectival anaphora is a composite consisting of variable-binding + discourse-pronominal reference at two distinct stages of grammar. Empirical evidence for such a model comes from the (seemingly) schizophrenic pronominal and bound-variable nature of such dependencies, diagnoseable by the usual syntactic and semantic tests.

Keywords

• perspective
• anaphora
• logophora
• agreement
• features
• syntax-semantics interface
• syntax-pragmatics interface
• left periphery
• locality
• Tamil