The acquisition of reflexives and pronouns by Faroese children

This article reports the results of an experimental study on the interpretation of reflexives and pronouns by Faroese-speaking children and adults. The experiment was a replication of a study on Icelandic reported in Sigurjónsdóttir (1992) and Sigurjónsdóttir and Hyams’ (1992), and was carried out to validate its findings. Faroese and Icelandic share certain pronominal features. Both have a long-distance anaphor, the interpretation of which is affected by different verb classes, and which also has a logophoric use. The Faroese results shed new light on binding in adult and child Faroese, and validate the most important finding of the Icelandic study, in that they show a developmental delay with both pronouns and the long-distance anaphor for one verb class. Keywords: binding; reflexives; pronouns; acquisition; Faroese; Icelandic; long-distance anaphor; logophor; coreference