Since Chomsky formulated the Binding Theory, the characteristically invariant form of anaphora in many languages provides a crucial link between morphology and binding. It has been argued that invariance reflects lack of those speculations for gender,...
Since Chomsky formulated the Binding Theory, the characteristically invariant form of anaphora in many languages provides a crucial link between morphology and binding. It has been argued that invariance reflects lack of those speculations for gender, number and person which enable pronouns to have independent reference. Unlike pronouns, anaphora must therefore always be bound because binding represent the conditions under which reference is inherited. Then, Burzio shows that the true cross-linguistic generalization for pronoun is complementary with anaphora, and not 'not locally bound' by Chomsky's principle B. In this article I examined how well or badly his proposals fit in Russian.
As I have discussed above, Burzio's statement that an anaphor has no features, is too general and somewhat wrong in the view of Russian anaphora, because Russian reflexive possessive свой has distinct features depending on person, number and gender. He does not even mention case at all which Russian anaphora retain. Moreover, to the contrary of hierarchical order of choice for NPs by Burzio, the choice among NPs (anaphor, pronominal and R-expression), according to Timberlake, depends on the type of sentence, governing verb and so on. Lastly, not only do we need to give a different notions for principle A and B as Burzio argues, but also we need to verify local domains in dealing with Russian anaphora (reciprocal and reflexive). As shown above, therefore, the conditions of Russian anaphora are too various and delicate to simply generalize as Burzio does.