Cross-Linguistic Studies of Imposters and Pronominal Agreement (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax)

Imposters are third person DPs that are used to refer to the speaker/writer or addressee, such as :

(i) Your humble servant finds the time before our next encounter very long.
(ii) This reporter thinks that the current developments are extraordinary.
(iii) Daddy will be back before too long.
(iv) The present author finds the logic of the reply faulty.

This volume explores verbal and pronominal agreement with imposters from a cross-linguistic perspective. The central questions for any given language are: (a) How do singular and plural imposters agree with the verb? (b) When a pronoun has an imposter antecedent, what are the phi-features of the pronoun? The volume reveals a remarkable degree of variation in the answers to these questions, but also reveals some underlying generalizations. The contributions describe imposters in Bangla, Spanish, Albanian, Indonesian, Italian, French, Romanian, Mandarin and Icelandic.