Towards a description of semantic binding of personal pronouns in the Russian language: An experimental study
Daria Paramonova
Lomonosov Moscow State University / Pushkin State Russian Language Institute
Abstract: This paper focuses on the contexts of semantic binding of anaphoric pronouns of the 1st/2nd person in Russian. For English and a number of languages, a corresponding formal analysis has been formulated, describing the properties of the Fake Indexicals. They are the 1st/2nd person pronouns that function as bound variables in a sentence, although usually these pronouns clearly refer to the speaker/listener and should not have a bound interpretation [Partee 1989]. There seems to be no theoretical literature studying Russian pronouns within the framework of Fake Indexicals theory, thus the contribution of this experimental research is the novel data concerning the possibility for Russian pronouns to have bound reading and the reasons behind that. Null pronouns are bound in all types of clauses, while overt pronouns are only bound in sentential clauses and act similar to logophoric pronouns beginning with the unvalued log-feature. Possessive pronouns can never be the antecedent because they cannot transmit their features to the matrix predicate.
Keywords: semantic binding, experimental research, focus constructions, personal pronouns, Fake Indexicals, logophoric pronouns, agreement
For citation: Paramonova D. Towards a description of semantic binding of personal pronouns in the Russian language: An experimental study. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2025. Vol. 8, iss. 2. Pp. 89–121. (In Rus.) doi:10.37632/PI.2025.52.82.004
