ON THE REPRESENTATIONAL NATURE OF REPRESENTATIONAL NOUN PHRASES

The main explanations for the exceptional behavior of reflexives in "representational noun phrases'' such as a picture of himself rely on the linguistic structure that the Binding Theory is sensitive to: either the syntactic structure (Chomsky, 1986; Davies & Dubinsky, 2003) or the argument structure (Pollard & Sag, 1992; Reinhart & Reuland, 1993). We present evidence from two scene verification experiments and one visual world eye-tracking experiment supporting a possible alternative explanation that links this exceptional behavior instead to the representational use of the NPs, essentially characterizing them as a type of "near reflexive'' or "proxy reflexive'' (Lidz, 2001; Reuland, 2001). We sketch analyses of representational noun phrase reflexives inspired by the Jackendoff (1992), Lidz (2001) and Reuland (2001) accounts of proxy reflexives, and explore the implications of these results on the structure-only accounts of representational noun phrase reflexives mentioned above.