He himself: Rediscovering a non-local anaphor

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss data that were first introduced in a brief but we believe unsettled controversy in Linguistic Inquiry in the late 1980s and early 1990s that has not received much attention since. We analyze the properties of elements like he himself in English, which has to be coreferent with a non-local c-commanding antecedent, provided there is one in the sentence. We take he himself to be the result of the adjunction of himself to he at a certain point in the derivation. After presenting our analysis we discuss its theoretical implications.