SEMАNTIC BINDING OF 1st AND 2nd PЕRSON PRONOUNS IN RUSSIАN

Most commonly, 1st and 2nd person pronouns refer to the contextual constants, the Speaker and the Addressee, respectively. However, since the pioneering work of Barbara Partee, it is known that there are also cases when the 1st and 2nd person pronouns are interpreted as bound variables. Such cases in English and some other languages have been extensively discussed in theoretical linguistics with the aim of establishing whether person features of bound 1st and 2nd person pronouns are interpreted on their own or merely transmitted from the pronouns' antecedents in syntax.стант Говорящий-Слушающий.

This paper makes an attempt at exploring the problem of the semantic binding of 1st and 2nd person pronouns in Russian. A preliminary study allows us to cast some doubt on the idea that feature transmission, if it is responsible for bound variable readings, is subject to constraints on syntactic locality. It appears that the semantic binding of 1st and 2nd person pronouns is often dispreferred, but not for purely syntactic reasons. What seems to matter is the competition with pure indexical interpretation and the pragmatic plausibility of the readings.