Probes, Pronouns and Binding in the Minimalist Program

This book investigates the syntactic restrictionsthat determine the distribution of pronouns andreflexives. The book deals with three main topics:the nature of probes; the internal structure ofpronouns and reflexives; and the interplay ofsyntactic features. It is argued that not only heads,but also phrases are involved in initiating theprocesses of agreement. The author shows thatpronouns and reflexives have different internalstructure, and as a consequence pronominal andreflexive DPs have different feature values. It isshown that the agreement process that take placebetween antecedent and pronoun/reflexive is nodifferent from that of other syntactic agreementrelations. The analysis is formulated in theframework of Distributed Morphology and a phase basedsyntax and makes use of notionssuch as feature chains and valued and unvaluedfeatures.