Malayalam long-distance anaphor taan: a null theory

Abstract

The Dravidian languages, Malayalam included, have a third-person pro-form taan, with a surprising locality profile. Like pronouns, taan cannot be bound locally; like reflexives, it seems to require a sentence-internal antecedent. Nearly three decades years ago, Jayaseelan (1997) argued that Malayalam taan is a Condition B-obeying pronoun, but this analysis has since fallen out of favor. A prominent alternative instead treats taan as a reflexive, bound by a silent pronoun instantiating a syntactically-represented perspectival center (Jayaseelan 1998 for Malayalam; Sundaresan 2012, Sundaresan 2018 for Tamil). In this paper, I will reexamine the syntactic and interpretive profile of taan and argue that the evidence favors the ‘taan-as-pronoun’ analysis. Minor amendments to taan’s semantics — specifically, encoding its perspective-sensitivity as a presupposition — capture much of its distribution.