Cross-Linguistic Studies of Imposters and Pronominal Agreement [Paperback]

Imposters are third person DPs that are used to refer to the speaker/writer or addressee, such as :

(i)Your humble servantfinds the time before our next encounter very long.
(ii)This reporterthinks that the current developments are extraordinary.
(iii)Daddywill be back before too long.
(iv)The present authorfinds the logic of the reply faulty.

This volume explores verbal and pronominal agreement with imposters from a cross-linguistic perspective. The central questions for any given language are: (a) How do singular and plural imposters agree with the verb? (b) When a pronoun has an imposter antecedent, what are the phi-features of the pronoun? The volume reveals a remarkable degree of variation in the answers to these questions, but also reveals some underlying generalizations. The contributions describe imposters in Bangla, Spanish, Albanian, Indonesian, Italian, French, Romanian, Mandarin and Icelandic.

1. Introduction
Chris Collins

2. (Il)-licit Pronoun-Antecedent Relations in Bangla
Satarupa Das

3. Spanish Imposters and Verbal Agreement
Rachel Dudley

4. Some Observations on Imposters in Albanian
Dalina Kallulli

5. The Syntax of Indonesian Imposters
Daniel Kaufman

6. Imposters and Secondary Sources in Italian
Emilio Servidio

7. Person Imposters: The View from Two Romance Languages
Gabriela Soare

8. Mandarin Pseudo-Imposters
Arthur Wang

9. Icelandic Verbal Agreement and Pronoun-Antecedent Relations
Jim Wood and Einar Freyr Sigur?sson

10. Indefinite Imposters
Violeta V?zquez Rojas

Chris Collinsis a professor in the Department of Linguistics at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT in 1993. He specializes syntactic theory, including the syntax of English and the syntax of African languages.