(16) Sitting in the audience, Nixon was astonished to hear himself sing a foolish aria to Chou En-Lai.Here the reflexive has undergone reference transfer: it refers to Maddalena playing the character Nixon. Fro mthis we
learn that reflexive pronouns need not always be coreferential with their antecedents—already an important
grammaticaleffectofreferencetransfer. Butthereismore:wecannotusethereflexiveinthereversesituation,whenits
antecedent has undergone reference transfer and it has not.
(17) *Up on stage, Nixon was astonished to see himself get up and walk out of the opera house in disgust.(16) and (17) have syntactically identical relations between the reflexive and its antecedent, but they differ sharply in
grammaticality.^203 We conclude that reference transfer cannot be simply dismissed as irrelevant to grammar.
A third line of approach to reference transfer takes its cue fro mregular morphology: like regular affixes, reference
transfer is a piece of language that can be used freely online to construct novelutterances. Unlikeregular morphology,
though, it has no syntactic or phonological reflexes: it is just a conventionalized piece of meaning that has no overt
expression. (18) shows approximatelythe piece necessary for theham sandwichcases, an“operator”that means‘person
associated with.’
(19) shows how this integrates into the conceptual structure of (14). A dashed line surrounds the unit (18), which
satisfies a variableofwantan d whoseown variableis satisfied byham sandwich. (Jackendoff 1992b shows how such an
approach permits an interesting solution to the reflexive proble mposed by (16) and (17).)
PHRASAL SEMANTICS 389
(^203) Onemightattempttoescapethisconclusionbypositing an invisiblesyntacticdifferencebetween thetwocases. Jackendoff(1992b) exploresthisoptionindetailand shows
it cannot be sustained.