(Under)specification counts: When non-local anaphors are not exempt

Martin Everaert; Eric Reuland

doi:10.1162/ling_a_00526

(Under)specification counts: When non-local anaphors are not exempt

ILS - Language Structure: Variation and Change

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

We explore the proposal in Charnavel 2019, 2020 that nonlocal anaphor binding is only apparent and reduces to local binding by a silent pronominal element—prolog—as the subject of a logophoric operator OPLOG in the left periphery of the anaphor’s local domain. Like any pronominal, prolog can be valued by a distant antecedent and should license split antecedents and partial binding for the anaphor it binds. We show that ϕ-deficient anaphors in different language families allow nonlocal binding, while disallowing split antecedents and partial binding, contra the main hypothesis of the prolog approach. We describe a Multiple Agree–based analysis that accounts for the patterns observed.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	644–659
Number of pages	16
Journal	Linguistic Inquiry
Volume	57
Issue number	3
Early online date	5 Dec 2023
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00526
Publication status	Published - 2026

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.

Keywords

(Multiple) Agree
(under)specification
exemption
nonlocal anaphors
splitantecedents and partial binding

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10.1162/ling_a_00526Licence: CC BY

ling_a_00526Final published version, 132 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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title = "(Under)specification counts: When non-local anaphors are not exempt",

abstract = "We explore the proposal in Charnavel 2019, 2020 that nonlocal anaphor binding is only apparent and reduces to local binding by a silent pronominal element—prolog—as the subject of a logophoric operator OPLOG in the left periphery of the anaphor{\textquoteright}s local domain. Like any pronominal, prolog can be valued by a distant antecedent and should license split antecedents and partial binding for the anaphor it binds. We show that ϕ-deficient anaphors in different language families allow nonlocal binding, while disallowing split antecedents and partial binding, contra the main hypothesis of the prolog approach. We describe a Multiple Agree–based analysis that accounts for the patterns observed.",

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N2 - We explore the proposal in Charnavel 2019, 2020 that nonlocal anaphor binding is only apparent and reduces to local binding by a silent pronominal element—prolog—as the subject of a logophoric operator OPLOG in the left periphery of the anaphor’s local domain. Like any pronominal, prolog can be valued by a distant antecedent and should license split antecedents and partial binding for the anaphor it binds. We show that ϕ-deficient anaphors in different language families allow nonlocal binding, while disallowing split antecedents and partial binding, contra the main hypothesis of the prolog approach. We describe a Multiple Agree–based analysis that accounts for the patterns observed.

AB - We explore the proposal in Charnavel 2019, 2020 that nonlocal anaphor binding is only apparent and reduces to local binding by a silent pronominal element—prolog—as the subject of a logophoric operator OPLOG in the left periphery of the anaphor’s local domain. Like any pronominal, prolog can be valued by a distant antecedent and should license split antecedents and partial binding for the anaphor it binds. We show that ϕ-deficient anaphors in different language families allow nonlocal binding, while disallowing split antecedents and partial binding, contra the main hypothesis of the prolog approach. We describe a Multiple Agree–based analysis that accounts for the patterns observed.

KW - (Multiple) Agree

KW - (under)specification

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KW - splitantecedents and partial binding

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JO - Linguistic Inquiry

JF - Linguistic Inquiry

IS - 3

ER -

(Under)specification counts: When non-local anaphors are not exempt

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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Cite this