2011 Volume 28 Issue 1 Pages 23-55
It is argued that possessive indefinites in sentences like John enjoys a student’s life share common properties with bound pronouns in sentences like Every man loves his wife. The properties of indefinites of this kind are explained by the theory of inter-N-bar anaphora, proposed by Tsurusaki (1985) and developed by Hirose (1997). They are shown to have the status of N-bar constituents rather than full noun phrases (NPs), to describe the representative part of the subject referent, and to take a null determiner whose features are bound by a partitive operator involved in specific types of verb phrases. A new typology is given on the basis of the distinction between indefinite NPs and what are called “N-bar indefinites.”
