Imposters ─ A Study of Pronominal Agreement

Normally, a speaker uses a first person singular pronoun (in English,I, me, mine, myself) torefer to himself or herself. To refer to a single addressee, aspeaker uses second person pronouns ( you, yours,yourself). But sometimes third person nonpronominal DPs are used to refer to thespeaker--for example, this reporter, yours truly--or to the addressee-- my lord, the baroness, Madam ( Is Madam not feelingwell?). Chris Collins and Paul Postal refer to these DPs as imposters because their thirdperson exterior hides a first or second person core.

In this book they study theinteractions of imposters with a range of grammatical phenomena, including pronominal agreement,coordinate structures, Principle C phenomena, epithets, fake indexicals, and a property ofpronominal agreement they call homogeneity.

Collins and Postalconclude that traditional ideas about pronominal features (person, number, gender), whichcountenance only agreement with an antecedent or the relation of the pronoun to its referent, aremuch too simple. They sketch elements of a more sophisticated view and argue for its relevance andexplanatory power in several data realms. The fundamental proposal of the book is that a pronounagrees with what they call a source, where its antecedent constitutes only onetype of source. They argue that the study of imposters (and closely related camouflage DPs) hasfar-reaching consequences that are inconsistent with many current theories of anaphora.

Chris Collins is Professor of Linguistics at New York University. He is the author of Local Economy (MIT Press, 1997). Paul M. Postal is Research Professor in the Department of Linguistics at New York University. He is the author of Edge-Based Clausal Syntax: A Study of (Mostly) English Object Structure (MIT Press, 2011) and other books.