NP-anaphora and focused possessors in parallel architecture

Abstract

The Persian counterparts to English noun phrases like John's and mine involve the anaphoric element mal (lit. ‘property’). This element can form a possessive construction in combination with common noun phrases, proper names, or pronouns but can never co-occur with the otherwise ubiquitous pronominal enclitics in its anaphoric function. In this article an account of this co-occurrence restriction is given in terms of information structure. Specifically, mal, as an anaphoric element, is argued to be “topical” while its possessor constitutes the focus of the larger possessive construction. The non-occurrence of the pronominal enclitics with mal is proposed to be the consequence of a broader constraint that prohibits these elements from occurring in focused positions. The article presents a lexical entry for mal capturing its syntactic and semantic properties within the parallel architecture framework of Jackendoff (1997, 2002).