Causality, comitativity, contrastivity, and selfhood

Abstract

Abstract When people talk about reflexives, they often think of two arguments in an anaphoric or coargumental relationship. This paper sets out to show that reflexive adverbials also participate in such kind of relationship, but with a far greater range of interpretative possibilities closely associated with their syntactic distributions. The syntax-semantics correspondence strictly observes an inner-outer dichotomy of adverbials observed across languages, i.e., inner Self expresses comitativity, whereas outer Self express causality. Our finding thus lends a substantial support to the cartographic approach advocated by Rizzi (1997) and Cinque (1999) . It is also argued that this behavior can be accommodated by a general theory of reflexivity along the line of Reinhart & Reuland (1993) , given that a contrastive focus is introduced in accordance with the phase edges ( Chomsky 2000 , 2001 ). The “selfhood” can then be understood in a new light, not only in terms of the general theory of syntax-semantics mapping, but also in terms of the “topography” of adverbials, which is by and large determined by their morphological makeups in particular languages.

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