Logophoric Pronouns in Yoruba and the Movement to INFL versus Relativized Subject Hypothesis

NIKE S. LAWAL

Virtually all research on Long Distance Anaphors (LDA) within the GB theory have focused on one subset of LDA, namely, those that must be bound both within and beyond their local domain. In this paper we are concerned with a second type of LDAs which, unlike the first type, do not observe locality restrictions, hence they do not take clausemate antecedents. This second type are found mainly in African languages and are referred to as logophoric pronouns. Logophoric pronouns have been largely ignored in current analysis of Long Distance Anaphoric Binding. This gap or neglect is due to the assumption that such pronouns are governed by purely discourse rules and are thus considered to fall outside the realm of the Binding Theory. In this paper, we examine the distribution of the Yoruba pronoun "òun" and show that this assumption is incorrect and that some logophoric pronouns obey syntactic binding and display behavior similar to Chinese-type LDRs. However, these pronouns also display properties which cannot be accounted for fully or adequately under current proposals. These pronouns therefore need to be analyzed and included in any treatment of long distance anaphoric binding if we are to provide a unified account of LDRs.

In this paper, we examine the Yoruba logophoric pronoun "òun" in terms of the two current and most influential proposals about Long Distance Reflexives (LDRs), namely, the Infl movement hypothesis of Cole, Hermon, and Sung (1990) and the Anaphoric AGR and Relativized Subject proposal of Progovac (1993). We show that while neither approach can, in their present form, account for the distribution of Long Distance Reflexive Pronouns (LDRP) like "òun," the Relativized Subject approach fares better as it requires fewer modifications and extensions to provide a unified theory of Long Distance Anaphors which includes both LDRs and LDRPs.