This paper aims to investigate the morphosyntactic properties of 3rd person in English.
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The paper argues for the dissociation of the semantics of person and its morphological realization.
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3rd person is always the default feature and yet it has a feature specification.
Abstract
This paper aims to investigate the morphosyntactic properties of the person feature in the English imposter construction studied by Collins & Postal. In this construction, the same definite DP can select a 1st person reflexive or a 3rd person reflexive. Moreover, despite of the distinct person feature value, a 3rd person (non-reflexive) pronoun can have the reference to a speaker in the given contexts like a 1st person pronoun. This use of a 3rd person argument differs from that of a 3rd person argument that refers to the 3rd party. The present paper analyzes the mechanism of the person feature and its morphological realization (particularly 3rd person) in English, and proposes the dissociation of notional person (the semantics of the person feature) and grammatical person morphological realization. Both notional and grammatical person are not always uniquely associated with each other nor always equally encoded into a definite DP as well as a pronominal DP. The paper also argues that 3rd person is always a neutral/invariable form in English. Despite of it, a 3rd person argument is shown to have a feature specification. This paper demonstrates that the morphosyntactic variation associated with 3rd person agreement in English pronoun-antecedent relations is attributed to the lack of the uniform relation between the semantics of the person feature and its morphology, not to the syntactic operations.
