Treating Greek o eaftos mu as a Regular Anaphor: Theoretical Implications

Binding theory Condition A must be so formulated as to accommodate the range of behaviors exhibited by anaphors crosslinguistically. In this respect, the behavior of the Modern Greek anaphor o eaftos mu is theoretically important, as it has been reported to display a number of unusual distributional properties. This has led to treatments by Iatridou (1988) and Anagnostopoulou and Everaert (1999) different from the treatment of standard anaphors represented by English himself, thus requiring a rethinking of the classic Condition A descriptive generalization and its theoretical derivation. This article revisits the distribution of this expression, documenting that previous discussions are subject to a confound as this expression (a) is not always a reflexive and (b) has logophoric uses. Controlling for the nonanaphoric use of o eaftos mu as well as for logophoricity and relying on new data surveys, we conclude that when anaphoric, it is in fact a well-behaved standard anaphor from the point of view of the standard Condition A (akin to the version in Chomsky 1986).