Possessive Anaphora: From structure to interpretation

Abstract. The starting point of this paper is the apparent semantic symmetry between English and French pairs of examples like The name Mary, uses is not hers,/The name Mary, uses is not her, own and Le nom que Mariei utilise n est pas a ellezLe nom que Mariez utilise n'est pas le sienz. I will argue that this first-glance equivalence is misleading. In English, the possessive complement of a copular construction is ambiguous between a narrowly "possessive" reading and an elliptical relational reading. The former translates into French as a + DP, and the latter as le mienltienlsien... In both languages, the possessive predicate includes no empty nominal. English elliptical possessive DPs may include the adjunct own (his own [e]), an option which has no counterpart in French. I argue that all the interpretive features of the possessive expressions in the sentences at hand are rooted in their morphological or syntactic properties. Even logophoricity is a semantic effect of some formal properties of complex expressions of the him+self type.