Petya Zubkov’s PhD dissertation defense

Peter (Petya) Zubkov wll defend his dissertation The Grammar of Binding: A study with reference to Russian on Tuesday April 24 at 12.45.

This dissertation takes a minimalist perspective on the architecture of the language system and assumes no features or principles specific to reflexives. Reflexives are taken to realize bundles of derivationally valued interpretable phi-features that enter into Agree-based feature sharing dependencies with the antecedents, which encodes binding. The proposed system of assumptions is applied to the complex binding patterns of the Russian reflexives sebja and svoj and correctly derives the distribution of interpretive effects and animate versus inanimate antecedents, imperfections in the subject orientation of reflexives and complementary distribution of reflexives and pronominals, as well as some aspects of their morphological realization, which thus all become interrelated.