Reflexive anaphors and association with focus

Abstract

This paper investigates the behavior of the reflexive anaphor herself in English in conditions of narrow focus and argues in favor of (i) a theory of focus that is based around the notion of Current Question, and (ii) a theory of association with focus that assumes that some, but not all, focus associating operators exhibit conventional association; i.e. some, but not all, focus associating operators have lexical semantics that directly encode association with focus. The argument is based on the independently motivated observation that there exist asymmetries with regard to disjoint reference effects between subject and object wh-questions.