The whole picture: Disentangling locality, logophoricity and subjecthood in English picture noun anaphora

Abstract

This article provides a solution to the long-standing puzzle of English anaphors within so-called picture noun phrases, which superficially exhibit an exceptional binding behavior. In particular, picture noun anaphors seem, under certain conditions, to escape the locality conditions imposed by Condition A of Binding Theory. Previous proposals attribute such apparently exceptional behavior to various sources: the classical Binding Theory appeals to the possible presence of covert agents within NPs; predicate-based theories introduce the possibility of exemption from Condition A; others capitalize on possible homophony with (logophoric) pronouns. While all of these proposals provide valuable insight into some aspect of the puzzle, we show that they all fail to capture the full empirical picture. Based on a detailed examination of their behavior in various syntactic and interpretive conditions, we instead propose that English picture noun anaphors, like any other anaphor, systematically obey Condition A. Their apparent exemption from it in some cases derives from the possible implicitness of some binders, in particular, logophoric pronouns or nominal subjects. Furthermore, the availability of such covert binders is crucially affected by a binding-independent competition principle between weaker and stronger forms. Thus, the apparently irregular behavior of English picture noun anaphors results from the interaction between several factors (syntactic representation of logophoricity, syntactic projection of subjects in nouns, pronominal competition), which is responsible for the illusion that Condition A does not apply systematically. By disentangling these factors, we propose a solution that integrates previous insights without compromising on empirical adequacy or analytical parsimony.

1 Introduction

Since Warshawsky (1965) coined the term picture nouns to refer to phrases headed by representational nouns like picture or story, the behavior of English anaphors within such phrases has remained an outstanding issue for theories of binding. In particular, reflexives and reciprocals in picture noun phrases (henceforth, Picture Noun Anaphors or PNAs) seem to routinely disobey the locality conditions imposed by Condition A of Binding Theory, as illustrated in (1)–(2).

• (1) Tom_i believes that there is a picture of himself_i hanging in the post office.   (Jackendoff 1972: 133)

• (2) [The men]_i knew that there were pictures of [each other]_i on sale.   (Pollard and Sag 1992: 267)

This type of observation led many (starting with Postal 1971¹—see also Bouchard 1984; Rooryck and Vanden Wyngaerd 2011; among many others) to assume that PNAs form an exceptional class of anaphors. Drummond, Kush and Hornstein’s assumption is representative in this respect: “a reflexive within a picture noun phrase that is bound from outside its containing noun phrase is not a true reflexive subject to principle A. Rather, it is a pronominal with special logophoric requirements. This follows a long tradition of analysis [...]” (Drummond et al. 2011: 401).

A closer look at the literature reveals that the two main theories of anaphor licensing do not, however, assign a specific status to PNAs. First, Chomsky (1981, 1986) supposes that just like any anaphor, PNAs obey Condition A of Binding Theory, and must thus be bound within the smallest phrase containing them and a subject distinct from them.² Chomsky further posits the possible presence of a PRO-like implicit subject within DPs to account for the fact that anaphors like each other in (3) (vs. (4)) are not in complementary distribution with pronouns as expected under the classical Binding Theory (see further discussion in Sect. 2.1.1.3); the contrast between (3) and (4) derives from the meaning difference between tell and hear.

• (3)

  • a. They_i heard stories about [each other]_i.

  • b. They_i heard [PRO_k stories about them_i].  (Chomsky 1986: 166–167)

• (4)

  • a. They_i told [(PRO_i) stories about [each other]_i].

  • b. * They_i told [PRO_i stories about them_i].  (Chomsky 1986: 166–167)

Second, predicate-based theories (henceforth PBTs—see Pollard and Sag 1992; Reinhart and Reuland 1993; and subsequent versions thereof) do not treat PNAs as a special class either. Unlike Chomsky, they argue that PNAs in possessorless DPs are exempt from Condition A, which they redefine as obligatory coargument binding (see further discussion in Sect. 2.1.1.2). But in this respect, PNAs are no different from all other instances of anaphors lacking a coargument, such as (5a) (vs. (5b)). Exempt PNAs also pattern with other exempt anaphors in being subject to perspective-related discourse conditions: himself in (5a), for example, is licensed by the fact that the clause containing it represents the point of view of the referent of its antecedent, Max.

• (5)

  • a. Max_i boasted that the queen invited Lucie and himself_i for a drink.

  • b. * Max_i boasted that the queen invited himself_i for a drink.   (Reinhart and Reuland 1993: 670)

On the other hand, PNAs in possessed DPs are assumed to be subject to Condition A (at least under early PBT versions treating possessors as subjects; see further discussion in Sect. 2.1.2.1); in cases like (6b), the PNA must therefore be bound by the possessor. According to PBTs, this explains the reported contrast between (6a) and (6b).

• (6)

  

Thus, PNAs are consistently treated as plain anaphors (in Charnavel and Sportiche’s 2016 terminology) under the Chomskian theory, while under PBTs, PNAs divide into plain anaphors in possessed DPs and exempt anaphors (in Pollard and Sag’s 1992 terminology) in possessorless DPs. In both cases though, their occurrence within phrases headed by the descriptive class of picture nouns does not translate into a specific behavior.³

The nevertheless persistent idea of PNA exceptionalism may come from the failure of both theories to capture the full behavior of PNAs. As we will see, Chomsky’s theory is indeed unable to predict the contrast between PNAs under different perspectival conditions. For example, his PRO-based hypothesis should presumably imply that himself will have the same status in (7) and in (1) as long as the author of the picture is the same in both sentences (see further discussion in Sect. 3.2.3): in both, himself should only be acceptable if John took the picture, whether or not his point of view is represented in the clause, contrary to fact.

• (7) *Mary said about John_i that there was a picture of himself_i in the post office.   (Kuno 1987: 126)

Such sensitivity of PNAs to point of view (argued by Kuno 1972, 1987; Cantrall 1974; Keenan 1988; Zribi-Hertz 1989; i.a.) is what motivated PBTs to develop a theory of exemption, under which himself in (1) and (7) is not subject to Condition A, but to perspective-based discourse conditions.⁴ But conversely, PBTs thereby fail to predict the different grammaticality status of PNAs under different syntactic conditions, as shown for French by Charnavel and Sportiche (2016): in particular, the inanimate elle-même in (8), which lacks a coargument, should under PBTs be excluded in both (8a) and (8b) regardless of the position of its antecedent, given that inanimates cannot take perspective and, hence, cannot satisfy discourse conditions on exemption.

• (8)

  • a. [Cette loi]_i a entraîné la publication d’un livre sur elle_i-même et sur son auteur.

    ‘[This law]_i led to the publication of a book about itself_i and about its author.’

  • b. [Cette loi]_i est si importante que les journalistes prédisent la publication d’un livre sur elle_i-même et sur son auteur.

    ‘[This law]_i is so important that the journalists predict the publication of a book about itself_i and about its author.’   (Charnavel and Sportiche 2016: 49)

The goal of this article, which will concentrate on English reflexives (leaving the investigation of reciprocals and crosslinguistic anaphors for future research), is to solve the long-standing puzzle posed by English PNAs by integrating these various perspectives.⁵ As we will see, each of these theories provides valuable insight into the puzzle, but misses at least one crucial aspect of it. Instead, we propose a new combination of mostly existing ingredients that leads to a full solution to the PNA puzzle without assigning an exceptional status to PNAs.

In line with Chomsky (vs. PBTs), we argue that English PNAs, just like any anaphor, are uniformly subject to Binding Theory: Condition A suffers no exception (and is antecedent-based). We also agree with PBTs (vs. Chomsky) that, descriptively speaking, anaphors exhibit a heterogeneous behavior, being either plain or exempt. To resolve this apparent paradox, we adopt Charnavel’s (2020a, 2020b) hypothesis that the descriptive heterogeneity of anaphors can be reduced to the heterogeneity of their local binders. In particular, besides standardly postulated binders, anaphors—including PNAs—can take covert logophoric binders, which syntactically represent the locally relevant perspective center. Thus, anaphors that are descriptively exempt in fact covertly comply with Condition A.

Charnavel’s logophoric A-binder solution is not sufficient to fully solve the English PNA puzzle, however. As we will see, there is another factor at stake—hinted at by both Chomsky and PBTs, albeit in very different ways—which further complexifies the superficial behavior of PNAs: as shown by (5b) (vs. (5a)), English anaphors cannot always be logophorically bound even under appropriate discourse conditions. We will attribute this fact to an independent constraint, which, descriptively, blocks logophoric binding in the presence of a coargument subject. The theoretical relevance of subject coargumenthood for English reflexives—outside PBTs—is demonstrated in Ahn (2015), which distinguishes anaphors that are bound by a coargument subject from other anaphors on the basis of prosody-based diagnostics. To explain the blocking of logophoric binding in sentences like (5b), we propose to complement this insight with a strong/weak competition hypothesis à la Cardinaletti and Starke (1999): the apparent competition between some binders (i.e. logophoric binder and coargumental subject) in fact results from a competition between some possible bindees (strong herself vs. weak herself and weak her), which falls under a general competition principle between weaker and stronger forms. This hypothesis thus partly reintegrates in the account of PNAs both the relevance of coargumenthood, which is at the root of PBTs, and the possible presence of implicit PRO-like subjects within nominals, which is crucial to the Chomskian theory.

In sum, the seemingly heterogeneous distribution of the descriptive class of English PNAs illustrates how the interaction between simple and general principles—Condition A, logophoricity, weak/strong competition—can yield superficially complex behaviors. Such apparent complexity, in our opinion, does not warrant a relaxation of parsimony or rule generality, but a disentanglement of the various interacting factors.

The outline of the paper is as follows. The first part (i.e. Section 2) will re-examine the various properties purported to distinguish between plain and exempt anaphors in order to determine which of these properties actually characterize English PNAs in various syntactic contexts. To this end, we will mainly follow the proposals of Charnavel and Sportiche (2016) and Charnavel (2020a, 2020b) in order to independently determine the local domain relevant to PNA binding as well as the notion of logophoricity relevant to apparent exemption. This empirical exploration will motivate unification of the descriptively double (plain/exempt) behavior of English PNAs by adapting Charnavel’s (2020a, 2020b) logophoric A-binder hypothesis, which reduces exempt to plain behavior (as roughly represented in (9b) as compared to (9a)).

• (9)

  • a. ... [_XP DP_i X ... picture of herself_i ... ]

  • b. ... (DP_i) ... [_XP pro_log-i DP_k X ... picture of herself_i ...]

In the second part of the paper (i.e. Section 3), we will investigate the blocking of logophoric binding by the presence of (overt or covert) coargument subjects (i.e. explore the conditions of application of cases (10a) vs. (10b)).

• (10)

  • a. ... (DP_i) ... [_XP pro_log-i DP_k X [_NP ... picture of herself_i ...]]

  • b. ... (DP_i) ... [_XP ... [_NP DP_i/pro_subj-i picture of herself_i ...]]

To establish the generalization, we will first concentrate on the verbal domain, where the obligatory overtness of subjects removes a complicating factor. The generalization will be explained using Ahn’s (2015) discovery about the prosodic behavior of anaphors bound by coargument subjects along with Cardinaletti and Starke’s (1999) general principle of competition between weaker and stronger forms. We will then come back to the nominal domain, where we will explore the consequences of this competition when the possible implicitness of nominal subjects is added to the general picture.

2 Unifying plain and exempt PNAs: The logophoric A-binder hypothesis

English PNAs have received specific attention in the literature because, unlike other anaphors, they seem to be generally exempt from the structural conditions of locality defined by Condition A of Binding Theory. The goal of this section is to challenge this claim on both descriptive and analytical levels. Descriptively (Sect. 2.1), we show that PNAs can in fact be plain or exempt; we reach this conclusion by re-examining their distribution using a criterion independent of Condition A (i.e. Charnavel and Sportiche’s 2016 inanimacy-based tool) to distinguish between plain and exempt instances of anaphors. Analytically (Sect. 2.2), we propose that PNAs are in fact never exempt, but consistently obey Condition A; we obtain this result by adopting Charnavel’s (2020a, 2020b) logophoric A-binder hypothesis, which reduces exempt behavior to local binding by an implicit logophoric binder. This hypothesis correctly predicts the descriptively dual behavior of English PNAs while avoiding postulation of any kind of homophony or restriction of the scope of Condition A.

2.1 The descriptively dual behavior of English Picture Noun Anaphors (PNAs)

2.1.1 PNAs in possessorless DPs

In this section, we concentrate on the prototypical case of PNAs, namely reflexives in picture noun phrases that lack a possessor (henceforth possessorless PNAs). We show that, descriptively speaking, they are neither uniformly plain anaphors as implied by the Chomskian theory, nor uniformly exempt anaphors as implied by predicate-based theories, but in fact exhibit a dual behavior. Recall that by plain anaphors, we mean anaphors that standardly obey Condition A and by exempt anaphors, anaphors that seem to disobey Condition A; as we will see, the content of these terms thus depends on the definition of Condition A. The bulk of our argumentation challenging the earlier literature will therefore consist in independently determining the scope of Condition A and conditions on exemption.

2.1.1.1 Exceptional distributional properties of possessorless PNAs

As previewed in Table 1 and detailed below, possessorless PNAs are usually claimed to exhibit four distributional properties that distinguish them from plain anaphors (see Bouchard 1984; Lebeaux 1984; i.a.). It is generally assumed that possessorless PNAs are not unique in this respect, but share these characteristics with other instances of anaphors, in particular those within a conjoined DP (e.g. Mary and herself), within like-phrases (e.g. physicists like herself), within as for-phrases (e.g. as for herself) or within exceptive constructions (e.g. no one but herself) (see Ross 1970; Kuno 1972, 1987; Keenan 1988; i.a.).

Table 1 Purported specific distributional properties of possessorless PNAs

First, as mentioned at the start, it has been observed that possessorless PNAs need not be locally bound (see Helke 1970; Ross 1970; Jackendoff 1972; Cantrall 1974; Lebeaux 1984; Bouchard 1984; Kuno 1987; Zribi-Hertz 1989; Pollard and Sag 1992; Reinhart and Reuland 1993; i.a.). Example (11) below shows that himself need not be c-commanded by its antecedent; example (1) above illustrates that the antecedent of himself does not have to be in the smallest clause containing it, and example (12) that the antecedent does not even have to be within the same sentence. These reflexives thus appear to escape the locality conditions on anaphors under any definition of locality.

• (11) The picture of himself_i in Newsweek dominated John_i’s thoughts.   (Pollard and Sag 1992: 278)

• (12) John_i was going to get even with Mary. That picture of himself_i in the paper would really annoy her, as would the other stunts he had planned.   (Pollard and Sag 1992: 274)

Importantly, these examples remain apparent exceptions to the Chomskian Condition A even if we extend Chomsky’s PRO-based solution to them.⁶ Recall that in (3)–(4) above, Chomsky posits that the DP containing the picture noun can include a PRO-like subject, thereby allowing the object pronoun to corefer with an apparently local antecedent. If we adopt this hypothesis, we might further assume that the PRO-like subject can serve as the local binder of an anaphor. Extending this to examples like (1), (11) or (12), we may conclude that the appearance of exemption follows from local binding by the null nominal subject; this in turn would imply that in such examples, it is the referent of the antecedent of the reflexive that took the picture.⁷ But crucially, these examples do not require this type of interpretation: for instance, (11) is perfectly acceptable in a context where John did not take the picture—in fact, this is the most natural interpretation. That is not to say that Chomsky’s hypothesis must be abandoned without further discussion. We will see in Sect. 3.2.3 that it is in fact part of the solution. But the acceptability of these examples under a non-agentive interpretation of the antecedent shows that an extension of Chomsky’s hypothesis is not sufficient to account for all instances of non-locally bound PNAs. The aim of this first part of the paper (i.e. Section 2) is to investigate the cases that cannot fall under the Chomskian explanation; unless otherwise stated, all examples should therefore be read under the aforementioned non-agentive interpretation.

Second, possessorless PNAs are claimed to contrast with plain anaphors in allowing split antecedents (see Helke 1970; Bouchard 1984; Lebeaux 1984; Pollard and Sag 1992; i.a.).

• (13)

  • a. John_i told Mary_k that there were some pictures of themselves_i+k inside.

  • b. *John_i told Mary_k about themselves_i+k.  (Lebeaux 1984: 346)

Third, it is often assumed that possessorless PNAs can trigger sloppy or strict readings in ellipsis contexts, while plain anaphors only exhibit sloppy readings (see Bouchard 1984; Lebeaux 1984; Reinhart and Reuland 1993; Kiparsky 2012; Runner et al. 2002; i.a.).

• (14) John_i thought that there were some pictures of himself_i inside, and Bill did too.

  • a. Bill thought that there were some pictures of himself inside too.

  • b. Bill thought that there were some pictures of John inside too.   (Lebeaux 1984: 346)

• (15) John_i hit himself_i, and Bill did too.

  • a. Bill hit himself too.

  • b. #Bill hit John too.  (Lebeaux 1984: 346)

Finally, it is commonly supposed that possessorless PNAs, unlike plain anaphors, are in free variation with pronouns (see Jackendoff 1972; Lebeaux 1984; Chomsky 1986; i.a.).

• (16)

  • a. John_i knew that there were some pictures of {himself_i/him_i} inside.

  • b. John_i likes {himself_i/*him_i}.  (Lebeaux 1984: 346)

2.1.1.2 Possessorless PNAs as exempt under PBTs’ approach to exemption

These four purported distributional properties of PNAs and other instances of anaphors, which are properties of pronouns, have caused a widespread and persistent assumption that PNAs are in fact not real anaphors, but pronouns (see Bouchard 1984; Safir 2004; Drummond et al. 2011; Rooryck and Vanden Wyngaerd 2011; i.a.). However, this hypothesis implies some kind of lexical ambiguity or homophony: English herself would have two—related—lexical entries, one for plain behavior, one for exempt behavior. This assumption clearly goes against parsimony, especially since the generalization holds cross-linguistically: it is not just in English, but also in many other unrelated languages like Chinese, Korean or Turkish, that reflexives exhibit a dual behavior (see review in Charnavel 2020a).

Instead of postulating homophony between an anaphor herself and a pronoun herself, PBTs (Pollard and Sag 1992; Reinhart and Reuland 1993; i.a.) develop a theory of exemption that restricts the scope of Condition A. Under these proposals, Condition A, which is redefined as a condition on predicates rather than a condition on antecedence, requires that anaphors be bound by a syntactic coargument whenever they have one.⁸ Crucially, this implies that anaphors lacking a coargument, such as possessorless PNAs that are the only argument of the picture noun, are exempt from Condition A. Such exempt anaphors, PBTs argue, are instead subject to discourse conditions related to perspective.^9,10 Indeed, it has long been observed that possessorless PNAs and other exempt anaphors are licensed in clauses expressing the point of view of their antecedent (Kuroda 1965, 1973; Cantrall 1969, 1974; Kuno 1972, 1987; Clements 1975; Sells 1987; Zribi-Hertz 1989, i.a.). This generalization, exemplified by the contrast between (1) and (7) above, is also illustrated by the contrast between (12) and (17).

• (17) Mary was quite taken aback by the publicity John_i was receiving. That picture of him(*self_i) in the paper had really annoyed her, and there was not much she could do about it.  (Pollard and Sag 1992: 274)

PBTs thus directly account for the first distributional property of possessorless PNAs mentioned above: possessorless PNAs need not be locally bound since, in the absence of a coargument, they are exempt from Condition A. The second property of PNAs, namely the acceptability of split antecedence, also follows from PBTs, according to Pollard and Sag (1992: 270): exempt anaphors, which are not subject to Condition A, are free to refer to a group entity formed in the discourse, regardless of whether this entity is expressed as a single DP in the syntax. The availability of strict readings, Reinhart and Reuland (1993: 674) claim, is also accounted for under their theory (complemented with Rule I; see e.g. Grodzinsky and Reinhart 1993): possessorless PNAs, which are exempt from Condition A, can be related to their antecedent either by variable binding or by coreference, whereas anaphors with a coargument, which obey Condition A and must thus be coindexed with a coargument, can only be interpreted by variable binding. As for non-complementarity between PNAs and pronouns, it is also predicted by PBTs: given that PBT Condition B forbids pronouns from being bound by coarguments, it follows that exempt anaphors, which by definition lack a coargument, can alternate with pronouns (under appropriate discourse conditions). Furthermore, the distinction between syntactic and semantic coarguments made by Reinhart and Reuland (1993) explains the contrast between (3), where the PNA alternates with the pronoun, and (4), where it does not: in sentences like (4), the pronoun, unlike the reflexive, is ruled out by the semantic representation of the agent role associated with the picture noun, because only Condition B (vs. Condition A) is sensitive to semantic co-argumenthood.¹¹

2.1.1.3 Possessorless PNAs as plain or exempt under Charnavel and Sportiche’s (2016) approach to exemption

Because PBTs redefine Condition A as obligatory coargument binding, the core property held to be responsible for the exempt behavior of possessorless PNAs is their lack of a coargument. As argued in detail in Charnavel and Sportiche (2016) based on French anaphors, this approach to exemption is empirically incorrect; we confirm this conclusion for English PNAs below. Instead, Charnavel and Sportiche (2016) propose a criterion independent of Condition A to descriptively tease apart plain and exempt anaphors, namely inanimacy. Their reasoning is based on the widespread observation (also adopted by PBTs) that, cross-linguistically, exempt reflexives are subject to logophoric conditions, i.e. their clause must express the point of view of their antecedent (see aforementioned references). Given the controversial and often imprecise definition of logophoricity (see review in Charnavel 2020a), this notion cannot be directly used to detect exempt anaphors. But non-logophoricity, Charnavel and Sportiche (2016) argue, can conversely be used to identify plain anaphors. Specifically, they hypothesize that inanimate anaphors cannot be logophoric, as by nature they lack a mental state, which is required to take perspective under (virtually¹²) all definitions of logophoricity, and therefore are not eligible for exemption.

This inanimacy-based tool can be used to re-examine the distributional properties of English possessorless PNAs (cf. Bassel 2018 on Hebrew). It reveals that, contrary to the predictions of PBTs, possessorless PNAs do not consistently exhibit an exempt behavior. First, inanimate possessorless PNAs do obey locality conditions:¹³ unlike himself in (1), (11) or (12) above, itself must be bound (see (18a) vs. (18c)) and cannot be bound across a subject (see (18a) vs. (18b)).¹⁴

• (18)

  • a. [The witty play]_i inspired a parody of itself_i.

  • b. *[The witty play]_i inspired {many theaters/Bob} to present a parody of itself_i.

  • c. *The controversies surrounding [the witty play]_i inspired a parody of itself_i.

Second, inanimate possessorless PNAs must be exhaustively bound. For example, unlike animate themselves in (13) and (19b), inanimate themselves in (19a) cannot take a split antecedent.

• (19)

  • a. *After the renovation of [the castle]_i, [the museum next to it]_k had pictures of themselves_i+k printed.

  • b. After John_i graduated high school, [his mom]_k had pictures of themselves_i+k printed.

These distributional differences between inanimate and animate possessorless PNAs are not predicted by PBTs, according to which possessorless PNAs should uniformly be exempt, whether animate or not, since they lack a coargument. Certainly, PBTs argue that exempt anaphors are subject to perspective-related discourse conditions, which could presumably rule out examples (18b–18c) and (19a) (as we will in fact argue in Sect. 2.2.1). But crucially, examples like (18a) (see also (21)–(22) and (24) below) should similarly be ruled out under PBTs since they also contain non-perspectival anaphors without coarguments. Application of the inanimacy-based tool to possessorless PNAs thus reveals that the dividing line between plain and exempt anaphors should not be based on coargumenthood. In fact, all the observations above also hold for all other types of anaphors without coarguments, as shown in (20), for example.

• (20)

  • a. [The witty play]_i refers to itself_i and its author.

  • b. *[The witty play]_i led {Bob / newspapers} to provide information about itself_i and its author.

The correct descriptive generalization, then, should be formulated as follows: all inanimate anaphors must be locally and exhaustively bound, but some animate anaphors (i.e. perspectival ones, see Sect. 2.2.1) need not be locally or exhaustively bound. Possessorless PNAs are not special in any way, but exhibit this dual plain/exempt behavior accordingly.

With respect to the remaining two purported distributional properties of exempt anaphors, inanimate possessorless PNAs pattern with animate ones: as illustrated in (21)–(22), they can trigger strict readings and alternate with pronouns. As we show below, this fact does not indicate that possessorless PNAs are exempt, but rather, that these two properties do not accurately distinguish exempt from plain anaphors.

• (21) [The castle]_i contains more replicas of itself_i than the museum does [contain replicas of it_i].

• (22) [This mysterious ruin]_i inspires many legends about it_i(self).

First, it is not the case that plain anaphors only trigger sloppy readings, whether we adopt a predicate-based or a Chomskian version of Condition A. Pollard and Sag (1992: 270, fn. 9) argue that a strict interpretation is favored in examples like (23), even if himself has a coargument (see more such examples in Dahl 1973; Sag 1976; Fiengo and May 1994; Hestvik 1995; Kehler 2002; Büring 2005; as well as in recent experiments like Frazier and Clifton 2006; Kim and Runner 2009; Ong and Brasoveanu 2014; McKillen 2016).¹⁵

• (23) If John_i doesn’t prove himself_i to be innocent, I’m sure that the new lawyer he_i hired will [prove him_i to be innocent].

Furthermore, the same observation crucially holds with inanimate anaphors as shown in (24). This reveals that the availability of strict readings in examples like (23) is not due to the anaphor being exempt (from Chomskian Condition A) due to their perspectival potential.

• (24) Mercury_i attracts itself_i less than silver does [attract it_i].

Charnavel and Sportiche’s (2016) inanimacy-based tool thus reveals that exemption is irrelevant to the availability of strict readings (though what factors are relevant remains to be found).

Second, it is not the case either that plain anaphors are in complementary distribution with pronouns—neither under PBTs, nor under Charnavel and Sportiche’s (2016) proposal. Inanimate anaphors, whether or not they have a coargument, can alternate with pronouns, as illustrated in (25) (see more examples in Cantrall 1974; Minkoff 2000; Charnavel 2020a; i.a.).

• (25) [That magnet]_i attracts paper clips to it_i(self).  (Minkoff 2000: 584–585)

Just as in the case of strict readings, we will not provide an explanation for this fact here, which bears on Condition B of Binding Theory; the observation that non-complementary distribution with pronouns, just like strict readings, is not a specific property of exempt anaphors, is sufficient for our purposes. But note that the fact illustrated in (25) (and more generally, our whole paper) is consistent with the standard hypothesis that pronouns must be disjoint from local binders (Condition B) and further supports the idea that the local domain relevant to Condition B is smaller than the local domain relevant to Condition A (Huang 1983; Chomsky 1986; i.a.; see fn. 24, 31, 51 and Sect. 3.2.3 for some further discussion about Condition B).

In sum, only two distributional properties reliably distinguish exempt from plain anaphors, as summarized in Table 2.

Table 2 Distributional properties distinguishing exempt from plain anaphors

Crucially, in contrast with the predictions of both Chomskian Binding Theory and PBTs, possessorless PNAs can behave as plain or exempt with respect to these two properties. The descriptive generalization we have reached in this section is thus the following:

• (26) Descriptive generalization about possessorless PNAs:

  Inanimate PNAs must be bound exhaustively and locally (i.e. within the smallest tensed TP containing them, without any subject intervening between them and their antecedent), whereas some animate PNAs need not be.

This generalization matches the generalization that Charnavel and Sportiche (2016) formulate on the basis of French inanimate anaphors in general (not just PNAs), which leads them to redefine Condition A as in (27).¹⁶

• (27) Condition A (Charnavel and Sportiche 2016: 71):

  A plain anaphor must be bound within the minimal spellout domain containing it (i.e. tensed TP, or any other XP with a subject distinct from the anaphor).

We will therefore adopt the definition of Condition A given in (27) for the remainder of our investigation of English PNAs. Note that we will not attempt to derive Condition A, as only the generalization about the binding domain of anaphors is relevant to our purposes. But as discussed in Charnavel and Sportiche (2016, Sect. 5.4.3), this formulation is compatible with movement-based approaches to binding (see Drummond et al. 2011; Kayne 2002; Charnavel and Sportiche to appear; i.a.).

2.1.2 PNAs in possessed DPs

2.1.2.1 Locality constraints of possessed PNAs in previous studies

As mentioned above, the distribution of English PNAs is typically discussed in configurations in which the reflexive is the only phrase within the DP. In particular, overt possessors are usually excluded from examples involving PNAs because it is traditionally assumed that only possessorless PNAs exhibit an exceptional behavior. In fact, Chomsky’s solution for (3)–(4) relies on a comparison with (28)–(29), which contain an overt possessor and are treated as baseline examples. Under the Chomskian theory, the presence of an overt possessor (in the specifier of DP) restricts the binding domain of a PNA to the DP containing it; PNAs in possessed DPs (henceforth, possessed PNAs) can thus only be bound by the possessor, as in (30).

• (28)

  • a. *They_i heard [my stories about [each other]_i].

  • b. They_i heard [my stories about them_i].  (Chomsky 1986: 166)

• (29)

  • a. * They_i told [my stories about [each other]_i].

  • b. They_i told [my stories about them_i].  (Chomsky 1986: 166–167)

• (30) They_i {heard/told} [their_i stories about [each other]_i].

Possessed PNAs have received more attention in PBTs. In early versions of the theory (Pollard and Sag 1992; Reinhart and Reuland 1993), possessed PNAs are treated as plain anaphors (just like under the Chomskian theory) on the basis of reported contrasts like (6a) vs. (6b) above or (31a) vs. (31b) below. These contrasts are predicted under PBTs by the hypothesis that the possessor is a subject of the nominal predicate.¹⁷

• (31)

  • a. John_i’s description of himself_i was flawless.

  • b. *The fact that Mary_k’s description of himself_i was flawless was believed to be disturbing John_i.  (Pollard and Sag 1992: 265)

But these contrasts are not robust, as already suggested in Reinhart and Reuland (1993: 683, citing Ben-Shalom and Weijler 1990), prompting speculation therein that NPs may in fact never contain a subject, as proposed in Williams (1985).¹⁸ Many experimental studies (Asudeh and Keller 2001; Keller and Asudeh 2001; Runner et al. 2002, 2003, 2006; Jaeger 2004; Runner and Kaiser 2005; i.a.) have since confirmed that possessed PNAs can be bound from outside their picture NP. For example, the magnitude estimation task used by Keller and Asudeh (2001: 7) revealed no significant acceptability difference between (32a) and (32b), which are both highly acceptable.

• (32)

  • a. Hannah_i found Peter_k’s picture of herself_i.

  • b. Hannah_i found Peter_k’s picture of her_i.  (Keller and Asudeh 2001: 5)

According to these experimental studies, the empirical observations in (32) do not challenge PBTs but, rather, the status PBTs assign to the possessor. Building on Williams (1985) and Barker (1995), Asudeh and Keller (2001) argue that the possessor is not an argument of the head noun (cf. Keller and Asudeh 2001; Runner and Kaiser 2005; i.a.). Under that revised assumption, possessed PNAs do not have any coarguments. They are thus predicted to be exempt and, therefore, able to take an antecedent outside their DP (under appropriate discourse conditions).

Inspired by Reinhart and Reuland (1993: fn. 49) and Runner (2007), Reuland (2011: 254) presents another solution to the issue, which relies on a modification of PBT Condition A: obligatory coargument binding only applies to eventive predicates.¹⁹ What this hypothesis predicts for PNAs depends on the extent to which (some) picture nouns can be treated as eventive. Reuland (2011: 254–255, 381–382, fn. 7–8) does not investigate in detail the question, but suggests three possibilities. Under the first option, nouns never have an eventive role, which makes the same prediction as the previous hypothesis: all possessed PNAs are exempt. Under the second option, only Grimshaw’s (1990) complex event nominals (i.e. nouns that have an internal aspectual analysis) are eventive; this predicts that possessed PNAs are generally exempt, except for anaphors in complex event nominals. This prediction is supported by the contrast between sentences like (32a) and sentences like (33a–33b).²⁰

• (33)

  • a. *Jill_i found Matt_k’s fear of herself_i surprising.

  • b. *Joanna_i was irritated by Mark_k’s pride in herself_i.   (Runner 2007: 83; Sturgeon 2003: 508, fn. 10)

Finally, under the third option, only concrete nominals, which denote a physical object, lack an event role. Concrete nominals contrast not only with complex event nominals, but also with result nominals, which denote the outcome of an event. Applied to picture nouns, the concrete/result distinction tracks with a distinction in sense (see Davies and Dubinsky 2003): picture nouns pattern with concrete nominals when referring to a physical object, but pattern with result nominals when referring to informational content. Hence, this third option predicts that possessed PNAs are exempt only when the picture noun is object-referring. Reuland (2011) mentions as support for this hypothesis the contrast between (34a) and (34b), noted in Runner (2007: 83).²¹

• (34)

  • a. ✓/?Joe_i destroyed Harry_k’s book about himself_i.

  • b. ?/*Joe_i wrote Harry_k’s book about himself_i.  (Runner 2007: 84)

In sum, while the Chomskian theory and early PBTs predict possessed PNAs to be obligatorily bound by the possessor due to Condition A, later PBTs consider either all possessed PNAs (Keller and Asudeh 2001; Runner and Kaiser 2005; i.a.) or only non-eventive possessed PNAs (Runner 2007; Reuland 2011; i.a.) to be exempt from Condition A.

2.1.2.2 Re-examining the locality constraints of possessed PNAs

The difficulty in pinning down the status of possessed PNAs is due to the controversy surrounding several variables simultaneously: the definition of Condition A, the potential conditions for exemption from it, the status of the so-called possessor. As in the case of possessorless PNAs, Charnavel and Sportiche’s (2016) inanimacy-based tool can be used to at least partially settle the issue by providing a criterion independent of Condition A to tease apart plain and exempt anaphors.²²

Specifically, the inanimacy-based tool can be used to test the hypothesis of late PBTs that possessed PNAs are exempt (at least with non-eventive nouns; see Sect. 2.1.2.1). Recall that PBTs take anaphors to be exempt in the absence of syntactic coarguments, and that exempt anaphors are assumed to be subject to discourse conditions relating to perspective; hence, if the possessor does not comprise a syntactic coargument of a possessed PNA, then possessed PNAs are predicted to be licensed only if logophoric. Given that, as we saw, inanimates are non-perspectival and thus ineligible for exemption, this hypothesis would entail that inanimate possessed PNAs should never be acceptable (at least with non-eventive nouns). But the contrast between (35) and (36) shows that this prediction is not borne out: only inanimate possessed PNAs that are bound across the possessor are unacceptable.²³ This is true even in concrete nominals ((35b) vs. (36b)), contrary to the most conservative hypothesis of Reuland (2011), under which only concrete nouns are treated as non-eventive.

• (35)

  • a. *[The castle]_i looks very different from Mary’s replica of itself_i.

  • b. *[The castle]_i collapsed on Mary’s replica of itself_i.

• (36)

  • a. Mary was impressed by [the castle]_i’s replica of itself_i.

  • b. Mary polishes [the castle]_i’s replica of itself_i.

Hence, it is neither the case that possessed PNAs uniformly behave as exempt, nor that the locality constraints on possessed PNAs depends on the nature of the noun predicate, as implied by the latest PBTs. Rather, the behavior observed of possessed PNAs depends on the logophoric potential of the reflexive: just like possessorless PNAs, possessed PNAs exhibit a dual behavior (plain vs. exempt), irrespective of the interpretation of the picture noun. Specifically, non-perspectival PNAs like itself in (35)–(36) must be bound by the possessor, while perspectival PNAs like himself/herself in (32a) and (34a) need not be bound by the possessor. This observation supports the Chomskian notion of locality revisited by Charnavel and Sportiche (2016): the presence of a so-called possessor does turn the DP into a binding domain. This is not due to the argumental status of the possessor as implied by early PBTs (and correctly questioned by late PBTs; see discussion in Sect. 3.2.2). Rather, formation of a binding domain follows from the position of the possessor in the specifier of DP, which entails the formation of a spellout domain (see Charnavel and Sportiche 2016).

This conclusion about the dual behavior of possessed PNAs is further supported by the observation that non-exhaustive binding of possessed PNAs is only possible with animates.²⁴

• (37)

  • a. Mary_i looks like Sue_k in the library’s picture of themselves_i+k.

  • b. *[The museum]_i looks like [the castle]_k in the library’s picture of themselves_i+k.

• (38)

  • a. Mary_i will soon buy Sue_k’s sculpture of themselves_i+k.

  • b. * [The castle]_i will soon contain [the museum]_k’s replica of themselves_i+k.

As captured by the contrasts in (37) and (38), possessed PNAs can behave as exempt by licensing split antecedents if animate (cf. Helke 1970: 116), but exhibit plain behavior by requiring exhaustive binding if inanimate: whether the picture noun is interpreted as a result nominal (as in (37b)) or a concrete nominal (as in (38b)), split antecedents for inanimate PNAs are ruled out.

Thus, possessed PNAs are no different from possessorless PNAs in displaying both plain and exempt behavior (see generalization (26)) as summarized in Table 3.

Table 3 Distributional properties distinguishing exempt from plain anaphors

2.2 The analytically uniform behavior of English PNAs: Extending the logophoric A-binder hypothesis

In Sect. 2.1, we showed that just like any anaphor, both possessorless and possessed PNAs can descriptively behave as plain or exempt anaphors. We obtained this result by applying Charnavel and Sportiche’s (2016) inanimacy-based tool, which allowed us to determine the distributional properties distinguishing exempt from plain anaphors in a reliable way. This result challenges all previous theories: first, contrary to Chomskian predictions, PNAs can superficially be exempt from Condition A even under non-agentive interpretations, that is, when the referent of the anaphor is not the author of the picture; second, contrary to PBTs, the dividing line between plain and exempt anaphors does not lie in the presence of a coargument (whether the possessor counts as such or not), but in the perspectival interpretation of the anaphor; finally, contrary to the pervasive assumption represented by the claim in Drummond et al. (2011) above, that PNAs are logophoric pronouns (homophonous with anaphors), PNAs do not uniformly display pronominal properties, but can behave like plain anaphors.

The goal of the present section is to account for this apparently dual behavior of PNAs without appealing to homophony or restricting the scope of Condition A. We will reach this goal by adopting Charnavel’s (2020a, 2020b) logophoric A-binder hypothesis—thereby further supporting it by demonstrating that it also makes correct predictions for English PNAs. In the spirit of Chomsky (1986), this hypothesis retains the general applicability of Condition A by assuming the possible presence of implicit binders for anaphors. However, it introduces a new type of covert binder, which, unlike Chomsky’s PRO-like subject, does not entail an agentive interpretation, but derives the perspective-based contrasts observed above.

We begin by introducing Charnavel’s (2020a, 2020b) logophoric A-binder hypothesis in further detail in Sect. 2.2.1. Then, we extend this hypothesis to English PNAs: just as in Sect. 2.1, we will first concentrate on possessorless PNAs in Sect. 2.2.2, before applying the analysis to possessed PNAs, which raise further challenges, in Sect. 2.2.3.

2.2.1 The logophoric A-binder hypothesis

According to Charnavel’s (2020a, 2020b) hypothesis, descriptively exempt anaphors are in fact not exempt from Condition A, but are locally bound by a covert logophoric pronoun. Thus, the properties that characterize descriptively exempt anaphors do not come from the anaphors themselves, but derive from the nature of their binder.

Recall from Sect. 2.1.1.3 (see (27)) that we adopt a version of Condition A according to which anaphors must be bound within the minimal spellout domain containing them. Based on the same assumption, Charnavel (2020a, 2020b) hypothesizes that each spellout domain can contain a verb-like logophoric operator OP_LOG introducing a logophoric pronoun pro_log as its subject. This is represented in (39a), in which pro_log locally binds a PNA.

• (39)

  • a. (DP_i)… [_{SPELLOUT DOMAIN} ... [_LogP pro_log-i OP_LOG [_α … picture of herself_i …]]]

  • b. [[ OP_LOG ]] = λα.λx. α from x’s first person perspective   (adapted from Charnavel 2020b: 679)

Note that the category of the spellout domain shown in (39a) will depend on the syntactic configuration in which the PNA occurs: if the DP containing the PNA also contains a subject, then the DP will be the spellout domain relevant for binding (and can contain pro_log as a potential binder²⁵); if the DP lacks a subject, then the spellout domain will instead be the smallest phrase containing both the DP and a subject (or the smallest tensed TP containing the DP if the DP is the subject of a tensed TP). While pro_log refers to the locally relevant logophoric center, OP_LOG imposes the first-person perspective of that center on its complement α, as formulated in (39b). This hypothesis codes the intuition that the locally relevant perspective center, which is independently determined by a combination of syntactico-semantic and discourse factors, can be syntactically represented in each phase.

Charnavel’s hypothesis is inspired by the literature on logophoric operators and perspectival projections (see Koopman and Sportiche 1989; Kinyalolo 1993; Jayaseelan 1998; Speas and Tenny 2003; Adesola 2006; Anand 2006; i.a.), but differs from it in two main respects. First, it builds on Sells (1987) and Oshima (2006) in proposing a specific definition of logophoricity as first-person mental perspective (encompassing de se attitude and empathy) on the basis of anaphora-independent tests such as the epithet test for de se attitude shown in (40) and the French possessive cher test for empathy adapted to English in (41); this methodology circumvents the aforementioned issue regarding how to characterize the notion of logophoricity.

• (40) Epithet Test for detecting attitude holders in their attitude contexts:

  To simultaneously check whether a given DP₁ is in an attitude context and who the relevant attitude holder is, replace DP₁ with an epithet and determine its referential possibilities in unmarked situations (i.e. without using non-de se scenarios). If there is a DP₂ that does not locally-c-command the epithet but which the epithet cannot take as antecedent, then the epithet (and DP₁ it replaced) are in an attitude context and the referent of DP₂ is the attitude holder of that context. (cf. Charnavel 2020a: 146)

• (41) :

  To identify the possible empathy loci in a context containing a given DP, replace this DP with a possessive DP containing dear and determine its referential possibilities. If her dear is acceptable, its referent can be construed as the empathy locus of the context of the DP. Otherwise, only the speaker can be interpreted as the empathy locus.  (cf. Charnavel 2020a: 169)

Second, it makes two modifications to the syntactic representation of logophoricity by restricting logophoric domains to spellout domains (instead of full CPs as previously assumed; see Charnavel 2020b: 709–711 for discussion) and by treating OP_LOG as a verb-like operator introducing a subject (pro_log); this twofold innovation crucially entails that pro_log can serve as an A-binder for anaphors.

Under Charnavel’s hypothesis, apparently exempt anaphors like herself in (39a) are thus in fact bound locally (i.e. within their spellout domain) by the implicit logophoric pronoun pro_log. This predicts that descriptively exempt anaphors must be logophorically interpreted, and thus derives (instead of postulating) the correlation between logophoricity and exemption observed in many unrelated languages (see e.g. French elle-même and son propre, Korean caki-casin, Mandarin ziji or Icelandic sig,²⁶ as discussed in aforementioned references and reviewed in Charnavel 2020a).²⁷

2.2.2 Possessorless PNAs

2.2.2.1 Testing for the logophoric interpretation of exempt PNAs

Applying Charnavel’s (2020a, 2020b) hypothesis to our specific case study, we propose that descriptively exempt English PNAs are analytically plain, covertly complying width Condition A by virtue of binding by pro_log. This treatment entails that descriptively exempt PNAs must be logophorically interpreted (under a non-agentive interpretation²⁸) in the sense explained above. This correctly predicts our finding in Sect. 2.1.1.3 that inanimate PNAs are unacceptable unless locally bound by an overt binder: due to the incompatibility between inanimacy and mental perspective, inanimate PNAs cannot take pro_log as an antecedent. As we will now illustrate with possessorless PNAs, this also correctly predicts that animate PNAs that lack an overt local binder can only occur in phrases expressing the first-person mental perspective of their antecedents.

This first means that seemingly exempt PNAs must pass the tests described in (40)–(41). For example, neither himself in the complement of the attitude verb believe in (1) (repeated as (42a)), nor himself in the intended Free Indirect Discourse in (12) (repeated as (43a)) can be replaced with a coreferential epithet, as shown in (42b)–(43b); this demonstrates that the antecedents of these anaphors are relevant attitude holders in the clause containing them.²⁹

• (42)

  • a. Tom_i believes that there is a picture of himself_i hanging in the post office.

  • b. *Tom_i believes that there is a picture of [the idiot]_i hanging in the post office.

• (43)

  • a. John_i was going to get even with Mary. That picture of himself_i in the paper would really annoy her, as would the other stunts he had planned.

  • b. #John_i was going to get even with Mary. That picture of [the idiot]_i in the paper would really annoy her, as would the other stunts he had planned.

Himself in (11) (repeated as (44a)) can be replaced by an epithet, as shown in (44b), but also by a possessive DP containing dear as in (44c); this reveals that its antecedent, John, cannot be construed as an attitude holder, but can be construed as the empathy locus in the phrase containing himself. However, himself in (7) (repeated as (45a)), which is unacceptable, can alternate with a coreferring epithet, but not (under a non-ironic reading) with a possessive DP including dear (see (45b–45c); this shows that the antecedent of himself neither refers to an attitude holder, nor to an empathy locus, which makes himself non-logophoric and unable to be bound by pro_log.

• (44)

  • a. The picture of himself_i in Newsweek dominated John_i’s thoughts.

  • b. The picture of [the idiot]_i in Newsweek dominated John_i’s thoughts.

  • c. The picture of his_i dear son in Newsweek dominated John_i’s thoughts.

• (45)

  • a. *Mary said about John_i that there was a picture of himself_i in the post office.

  • b. Mary said about John_i that there was a picture of [the idiot]_i in the post office.

  • c. Mary said about John_i that there was a picture of his_i (*dear) son in the post office.

Second, the phrase containing exempt PNAs must express the first-person perspective of their antecedent. For instance, this predicts that himself in (42a), which refers to an attitude holder, must be read de se, as confirmed by (46).

• (46) Context: As a joke, Tom ran for a local election. Unexpectedly and unbeknownst to him, he got elected. What he knows is that the picture of the elected candidate, which he thinks is one of the other (serious) candidates, hangs in the post office.

  Tom_i believes that there is a picture of him_i(#self) hanging in the post office.

Similarly, this implies that John’s act described in (43) must be considered as a stunt by John himself; for example, the sentence is infelicitous if only the speaker considers this act as a stunt, but John considers it as an act of kindness.

2.2.2.2 Deriving the distributional properties of exempt PNAs

We have shown that the logophoric A-binder hypothesis correctly predicts the logophoric interpretations required for descriptively exempt PNAs. Adopting this hypothesis also allows us to derive the distributional properties that distinguish descriptively exempt from plain PNAs. As captured in (39) above, the apparent absence of locality constraints for exempt PNAs follows from the implicitness of their binder, pro_log, which like any pronoun need not be locally bound nor even take an overt antecedent in the sentence.

Similarly, the availability of non-exhaustive binding for exempt PNAs is an illusion due to the pronominal nature of their binder. As shown in (47) below (repeating example (13)), themselves, which descriptively takes a split antecedent (John and Mary), is in fact exhaustively bound by pro_log. The pronominal nature of pro_log, however, allows it to take a non-exhaustive antecedent; the Ewe example in (48) independently confirms that logophoric pronouns do not differ from other pronouns in this respect. Apparent non-exhaustive binding of the anaphor is thus analyzed as non-exhaustive antecedence of the exhaustive binder of the anaphor.

• (47) John_i told Mary_k that pro_log-i+k there were some pictures of themselves_i+k inside.

• (48)

  

In sum, the logophoric A-binder hypothesis allows us to reduce descriptively exempt PNAs to plain anaphors by deriving all their specific properties from the nature of their binder pro_log.

2.2.2.3 Independent arguments for the logophoric A-binder hypothesis

Charnavel (2020a, 2020b) provides additional arguments for the logophoric A-binder hypothesis independent of the properties of descriptively exempt anaphors. We show below that these arguments, which she uses to account for the distribution of French exempt anaphors, also apply to the case of English PNAs, thus further supporting extension of the logophoric A-binder analysis.

First, just like exempt anaphors in French (see Charnavel 2020a, 2020b) or Mandarin (see Pan 1997; Huang and Liu 2001; Anand 2006; i.a.), we observe that locally co-occurring exempt PNAs in English must exhaustively corefer. For example, (49) shows that even if himself (in (49a)) and themselves (in (49b)) can be descriptively exempt, they cannot co-occur in the same clause in (49c).

• (49)

  • a. John_i told Mary that there was a story about himself_i in the newspaper.

  • b. John_i told Mary_k that there were some pictures of themselves_i+k in the newspaper.

  • c. * John_i told Mary_k that there were some pictures of themselves_i+k and a story about himself_i in the newspaper.

This ban on non-exhaustive coreference between locally co-occurring exempt PNAs directly follows from the logophoric A-binder hypothesis. Recall that under this hypothesis, descriptively exempt PNAs are in fact plain anaphors and must thus be exhaustively bound within their spellout domain. Given that there is only one possible binder in the spellout domain (TP) containing themselves and himself, namely pro_log, both themselves and himself must be exhaustively bound by pro_log, which entails that they must exhaustively corefer.³⁰ Whether pro_log syntactically references John as the logophoric center in the embedded clause as in (51a) (cf. (50a)) or the sum of John and Mary as in (51b) (cf. (50b)), one of the anaphors will not be able to be exhaustively bound (namely, themselves in (51a) and himself in (51b)), thus ruling out the sentence.

• (50)

  • a. John_i told Mary that pro_log-i there was a story about himself_i in the newspaper.

  • b. John_i told Mary_k that pro_log-i+k there were some pictures of themselves_i+k in the newspaper.

• (51)

  • a. *John_i told Mary_k that pro_log-i there were some pictures of themselves_i+k and a story about himself_i in the newspaper.

  • b. *John_i told Mary_k that pro_log-i+k there were some pictures of themselves_i+k and a story about himself_i in the newspaper.

Note that alternative hypotheses discussed above cannot explain this exhaustive coreference constraint. For example, under the hypothesis that PNAs are in fact logophoric pronouns subject to discourse requirements, ban on disjoint exempt anaphors in the same domain could presumably derive from a pragmatic principle ruling out perspective conflicts (cf. Pan 1997; Huang and Liu 2001, i.a.). But this explanation cannot hold for (49c), which does not involve disjoint, but partially coreferential anaphors, and thus does not entail perspective conflict, as attested by the perfectly viable direct discourse counterpart in (52).

• (52) John told Mary: “There were some pictures of us and a story about me in the newspaper.”

This coreference constraint cannot straightforwardly derive either from another version of this alternative hypothesis, according to which PNAs would be logophoric pronouns that must be bound by a logophoric operator (cf. Anand 2006) and at most one logophoric operator per clause can be present (cf. Koopman and Sportiche 1989). As mentioned above, nothing should prevent a logophoric pronoun from being partially bound; in fact, Adesola (2006) explicitly allows non-exhaustive binding by a logophoric operator. The restriction of one logophoric operator per clause does not therefore entail any ban on partially coreferring logophoric pronouns within the same clause.

Second, the logophoric A-binder hypothesis predicts a Condition C effect if a descriptively exempt PNA locally co-occurs with an overt DP that refers to the logophoric center anteceding the anaphor (see Charnavel 2020a: 228). The contrast between (53a) and (53b) indicates that this prediction is borne out. As shown in (54), herself is licensed by the presence of pro_log in its spellout domain (the bracketed DP), which syntactically represents the logophoric center, Lucy; the presence of the DP Lucy in the same domain therefore entails a Condition C violation.³¹

• (53)

  • a. [Mean comments about herself_i on her_i blog] hurt Lucy_i’s feelings.

  • b. *[Mean comments about herself_i on Lucy_i’s blog] hurt her_i feelings.

• (54) [pro_log-i Mean comments about herself_i on {her_i/*Lucy_i’s} blog] hurt {Lucy_i’s/her_i} feelings.

To wrap up, both anaphora-based and anaphora-independent arguments thus motivate the hypothesis that the possible syntactic representation of implicit logophoric pronouns, which can serve as A-binders, is responsible for the illusion of PNA exemption. This hypothesis parsimoniously reduces apparently exempt PNAs to plain anaphors subject to a fully general Condition A.

2.2.3 Possessed PNAs

2.2.3.1 The logophoric A-binder hypothesis applied to possessed PNAs

So far, we have focused our analysis on possessorless PNAs. Given that one of the motivations (and consequences) of the logophoric A-binder hypothesis is to unify all instances of anaphors, we also apply it to possessed PNAs, as illustrated in (55) and (56) (repeating (32a) and (37a), respectively).

• (55) Hannah_i found [pro_log-i Peter_k’s picture of herself_i].

• (56) Mary_i looks like Sue_k in [pro_log-i+k the library’s pictures of themselves_i+k].

Just as in the case of possessorless PNAs, the acceptability of the descriptively exempt anaphor in these cases derives from the presence of pro_log with an appropriate reference in its spellout domain, namely in the possessed DP; the relevant interpretation relies on whether the discourse conditions allow the intended antecedent of the anaphor to be construed as the logophoric center in the DP (e.g. as empathy loci in (55)–(56)).

Note that the logophoric center that is syntactically represented in a domain need not be the closest available one in the sentence, as shown by examples like (57) (containing an English exempt anaphor) or (58) (including an Ewe logophoric pronoun). Therefore, the presence of a disjoint animate possessor in sentences like (55) does not necessarily create an intervention effect (but may be responsible for some variability in judgments about possessed PNAs³²).

• (57) John_i asked Bill_k who he_k thought had stolen the picture of himself_i.   (Cantrall 1974: 95)

• (58)

  

2.2.3.2 A remaining outstanding issue

The logophoric A-binder hypothesis thus seems to mostly solve the problem of picture noun anaphora: (60), which builds on (27), derives generalization (26), updated in (59).

• (59) Descriptive generalization (for all English anaphors including PNAs):

  Non-perspectival anaphors must be locally and exhaustively bound, whereas perspectival anaphors may appear not to be.

• (60) Condition A: All anaphors (including PNAs) obey Condition A, i.e. must be bound within the minimal spellout domain containing them. Possible A-binders include overt DPs and covert ones such as PRO or pro_log.

But the picture is not complete yet: a closer look at the data suggests that this solution is not sufficient. Specifically, we observe that in some configurations, possessed PNAs cannot be logophorically bound even under the appropriate discourse conditions; we will henceforth refer to this observation as the Logophoric Blocking Effect or LBE. This is first the case of PNAs in complements of creation verbs³³ such as himself in (61b) (repeating (34b), cf. (29a)).

• (61)

  • a. ✓/?Joe_i destroyed Harry_k’s book about himself_i.

  • b. ?/*Joe_i wrote Harry_k’s book about himself_i.

• (62)

  • a. *John_i took Mary’s pictures of him_i.

  • b. John_i found Mary’s pictures of him_i.   (Williams 1987: 156)

The particular behavior of reflexives and pronouns (as in (62)) in this type of syntactic contexts has been long noticed in the literature (Jackendoff 1972: 166–168; Chomsky 1986: 166–167; Williams 1987: 155–156; Reinhart and Reuland 1993: 685; Runner 2002; Davies and Dubinsky 2003: 25–27; i.a.) and has more recently been experimentally investigated (Keller and Asudeh 2001; Jaeger 2004; Bryant and Charnavel 2020; i.a.). The logophoric A-binder hypothesis is too weak to account for the contrast in (61): just like in (55) above, it predicts that himself in (61b) can be bound by pro_log, which should be able to refer to Joe, as implied by (61a). Another constraint must thus be responsible for ruling out (63).

• (63) *Joe_i wrote [pro_log-i Harry_k’s book about himself_i].

LBE also affects possessed PNAs in deverbal noun phrases like (64) or (65) (repeating (31b) and (33a)), which cannot be ruled out by the logophoric A-binder hypothesis.

• (64) *The fact that Mary_k’s description of himself_i was flawless was believed to be disturbing John_i.

• (65) *Jill_i found Matt_k’s fear of herself_i surprising.

Finally, novel experimental findings presented in Bryant and Charnavel (2020) reveal that possessed PNAs cannot be logophorically bound either when they stand as the goal argument of the noun, as illustrated in (66).

• (66) *Chelsey_i found Brandon_k’s letter to herself_i.   (Bryant and Charnavel 2020: 11–12)

In our view, these three types of data fall under the same category and demonstrate that an explanatory factor is yet to be added to the logophoric A-binder hypothesis to reach a full resolution of the PNA puzzle. The goal of the second and last part of the paper is to specify the nature of this additional factor that interacts with the logophoric A-binder hypothesis.

To give a preview, the additional factor that gives rise to LBE does not specifically target possessed PNAs: we hypothesize that the unacceptability of (63)–(66) results from the same constraint as the unacceptability of (5b) (vs. (5a)) repeated in (67b) (vs. (67a)), which involves a reflexive as direct object of the verb.

• (67)

  • a. Max_i boasted that the queen invited Lucie and himself_i for a drink.

  • b. *Max_i boasted that the queen invited himself_i for a drink.   (Reinhart and Reuland 1993: 670)

The ungrammaticality of examples like (67b), which seems to be responsible for the widespread assumption of PNA exceptionalism, remains another crucial outstanding issue that appears to undermine the logophoric A-binder hypothesis beyond PNAs. Recall indeed from Sect. 2.1.1.1 that, typically, English anaphors can be descriptively exempt only under some configurations: in particular, when they are within picture noun phrases (e.g. picture of himself), as well as within a conjoined DP (e.g. Lucie and himself as in (67b)), within like-phrases (e.g. physicists like herself), within as for-phrases (e.g. as for herself) or within exceptive constructions (e.g. no one but herself). This observation is what motivated the development of PBTs, which tie exemption to the absence of coarguments. Now, we have explained at length (especially on the basis of inanimate anaphors) why it is empirically incorrect to base the dividing line between plain and exempt anaphors on coargumenthood. We therefore do not intend to reincorporate the notion of coargumenthood into our account of apparent exemption from Condition A. But we will show that, at least descriptively, this notion does indirectly play some role in the licensing conditions on reflexives.

Specifically, we will conclude that the factor descriptively responsible for LBE in (67b) is the presence of a coargumental subject: the queen blocks logophoric binding in (67b), but not in (67a), because it is a subject coargument of himself only in (67b). And the reason why logophoric binding is excluded in the presence of coargumental subjects is because this configuration licenses alternative pronominal elements that are weaker and yield the same interpretation. We will thus hypothesize that LBE falls under a general principal of competition between weaker and stronger forms à la Cardinaletti and Starke (1999), which is fully independent of Condition A or exemption.

• (68) Logophoric Blocking Effect (LBE):

  Herself cannot be logophorically bound in the presence of a coargumental subject.

• (69) Weak/strong competition (Cardinaletti and Starke 1999):

  Weaker forms exclude stronger forms if they can yield the same interpretation.

Crucially, we will see that the same principle of competition can derive LBEs for PNAs in examples such as (63)–(66) once we clarify two issues specific to the nominal domain, namely the distinction between subjects of NP and other sources for possessors, and the conditions on implicit projection of nominal subjects. We will conclude that the ungrammaticality of (63)–(66) ultimately results from the obligatory presence of an implicit subject in NP in those cases. Besides solving the PNA puzzle, this investigation of LBE will thus provide a new probe into the controversial argument structure of NPs.

3 Deriving the logophoric blocking effect: The weak/strong competition hypothesis

This second part of the paper aims at explaining why the empirical scope of the logophoric A-binder hypothesis seems to be restricted, namely why logophoric binding is impossible for PNAs in some configurations, e.g. (63)–(66), in spite of favorable discourse conditions. First, we will explore such Logophoric Blocking Effects (LBEs) in the verbal domain, e.g. (67b): in Sect. 3.1, we will build on Ahn (2015) to establish the empirical generalization capturing the conditions under which LBEs arise for anaphors in verbal complements, and we will derive this generalization from a weak/strong principle of competition inspired by Cardinaletti and Starke’s (1999) work. Only then will we be in a position to examine the consequences of this hypothesis in the nominal domain, where it interacts with additional factors: in Sect. 3.2, we will examine its predictions for both possessorless and possessed PNAs and thus solve the remaining cases of LBEs, e.g. (63)–(66). We will thereby open new avenues for the investigation of nominal structures.

3.1 The logophoric blocking effect in the verbal domain

The goal of this section is to derive LBEs in the verbal domain (i.e. outside PNAs), where the generalization that will ultimately be relevant to PNAs is easier to establish in the absence of complicating factors specific to the nominal domain. In a nutshell, we will show, using prosody as a diagnostic, that logophorically bound herself is necessarily a strong form. Due to a principle of competition between weaker and stronger forms, LBEs therefore arise when anaphors occur in positions that can host weak elements, typically in positions with a coargumental subject.

We will begin in Sect. 3.1.1 by introducing Ahn’s (2015) empirical observations regarding the prosodic behavior of English reflexives. This allows us to distinguish two cases of descriptively plain English anaphors (i.e. anaphors that overtly obey Condition A): those that are strong, and those that are weak. We also summarize Ahn’s account of this distinction, which will serve as the starting point for our analysis of LBEs. In Sect. 3.1.2, we motivate a proposal that incorporates Ahn’s insights with the general competition principle of Cardinaletti and Starke (1999). As we will show, this combination of ingredients allows us to account for LBEs in English without restricting Condition A or appealing to homophony.

3.1.1 Two types of plain anaphors in English

3.1.1.1 Ahn’s (2015) empirical discovery

To understand why logophoric binding is blocked in examples like (67b), we will reexamine the behavior of anaphors through a different lens than Condition A, namely prosody, as done in Ahn (2015) (cf. Spathas 2010: Chap. 3³⁴). Specifically, Ahn (2015) observes that English plain reflexives descriptively fall into two classes: those that exhibit exceptional prosodic behaviors, and those that do not. To test the prosodic behavior of reflexives, Ahn examines them in positions where other elements bear nuclear phrasal stress in maximally broad-focus contexts (i.e. contexts in which they are neither given nor contrastively focused), as illustrated in (70)–(72).³⁵

• (70) What happened in the kitchen?

  • a. Remy accidentally burned Maríe.

  • b. #Remy_i accidentally búrned Marie.  (Ahn 2015: 42)

• (71) What happened in the kitchen?

  • a. #Remy_i accidentally burned himsélf_i.

  • b. Remy_i accidentally búrned himself_i.  (Ahn 2015: 42)

• (72) What happened in the kitchen?

  • a. Remy_i accidentally burned Marie and himsélf_i.

  • b. # Remy_i accidentally burned Maríe and himself_i.  (cf. Ahn 2015: 62)

On the basis of anaphora-independent data, Ahn (2015) demonstrates that, in neutral contexts, English phrasal stress is received by the most deeply embedded constituent in a spellout domain.³⁶ Whereas nuclear stress therefore typically falls on the direct object in basic transitive sentences (e.g., on Marie in (70)), it may not fall on himself in (71), or else the sentence is rendered infelicitous. Ahn calls anaphors that exhibit such exceptional prosodic behavior extrametrical; we will refer to them as weak. Importantly, not all anaphors are weak, as illustrated in (72), in which conjoined himself bears nuclear stress; such reflexives are strong, patterning with referential DPs. This immediately excludes the null hypothesis that reflexives never bear phrasal stress because they are given as a result of necessitating an antecedent.

Here we can already notice a link between prosodic behavior and logophoric behavior: the configurations that license logophoric binding in English (e.g. (67a)) resemble the configurations that exclude weak anaphors (e.g. (72)); conversely, the configurations that exclude logophoric binding (e.g. (67b)) resemble the configurations that can host weak anaphors (e.g. (71)). Ahn (2015) does not discuss logophoric anaphors and, in fact, leads to wrong predictions about them. We will nevertheless see that Ahn’s proposal provides the crucial clue to derive LBEs in English: logophorically bound anaphors cannot be weak.

3.1.1.2 Ahn’s (2015) account: Movement to reflexive Voice

This section offers an overview of Ahn’s (2015) account of the prosodic facts introduced above. While we will ultimately depart from certain details of Ahn’s proposal, two aspects will carry over to the present proposal: the appeal to movement, and the appeal to a covert reflexivizing head distinct from the anaphor.

As a first step to analyze the contrast between (71) and (72), Ahn (2015) identifies three syntactic configurations in which anaphors are strong.³⁷ First, English anaphors bear stress when they are separated from their antecedent by an island boundary. This was the case for himself in (72), which occurs in a coordinated structure; this is also the case for himself in (73), which appears in another type of island.

• (73) What is the setup for the show?

  • a. Louis plays a character like his bróther.

  • b. # Louis plays a character líke his brother.

  • c. Louis_i plays a character like himsélf_i.

  • d. # Louis_i plays a character líke himself_i.  (Ahn 2015: 50)

Second, English anaphors bear stress when their antecedents are derived subjects. This includes both subjects of passives as in (74) and subjects of raising verbs as in (75).

• (74) What happened at the meeting?

  • a. Liz_i was accidentally assigned to hersélf_i.

  • b. #?Liz_i was accidentally assígned to herself_i.  (cf. Ahn 2015: 53, 106)

• (75)

  

Third, English anaphors are strong if their antecedent is not the subject, as shown in (76c–76d) vs. (76a–76b). Note that prosody thereby distinguishes subject-bound reflexives from other instances of coargument-bound reflexives, further supporting our conclusion that coargumenthood per se does not determine an empirically correct dividing line for English anaphors.

• (76) What happened at the meeting?

  • a. # Liz_i assigned Danny to hersélf_i.

  • b. Liz_i assigned Dánny to herself_i.

  • c. Liz_i assigned Danny_k to himsélf_k.

  • d. # Liz_i assigned Dánny_k to himself_k.  (cf. Ahn 2015: 52, 63)

To account for these findings, Ahn (2015) is inspired by the similar behavior of the French reflexive clitic se and Sportiche’s (2014) analysis of it (as will become clearer in Sect. 3.1.2.1). Specifically, Ahn posits the presence of a reflexive Voice head (refl), which is endowed with an EPP feature that obligatorily attracts a reflexive argument. In a sentence like (71b), himself undergoes “covert overt” movement³⁸ to the specifier of the refl, as shown in the simplified representation in (77), thus mimicking reflexive clitic movement.

• (77)

  

Ahn’s appeal to movement directly derives the prosodic weakness of himself in sentences like (71b): because himself undergoes movement to the specifier of VoiceP, it is not the most deeply embedded constituent in its spellout domain and, hence, does not bear nuclear stress.

Movement also derives the fact that weak reflexives cannot be separated from their antecedent by an island boundary, as seen in (72)–(73): because himself occurs in an island, it cannot move to VoiceP, as shown below in the simplified representation of (72).

• (78)

  

As we will detail in Sect. 3.1.1.3, Ahn assumes in such cases (i.e. when the presence of a reflexive Voice yields ungrammaticality) that reflexives can be licensed in a derivation without reflexive Voice. In the absence of a reflexive Voice, himself in (72)–(73) remains the most deeply embedded constituent of its spellout domain, leaving it the target for nuclear stress.

Furthermore, association of reflexive movement with reflexive Voice head accounts for why weak reflexives cannot be anteceded by a derived subject. For example, the passive and raising constructions in (74)–(75) rely on a Voice other than the reflexive Voice (i.e. passive, raising; see Ahn 2015: 106–108). Given that only one Voice can be merged per clause, there is no reflexive Voice to trigger movement of himself in these examples; thus, Ahn here assumes a derivation without reflexive Voice, where himself remains low in the spellout domain and therefore bears nuclear stress. Note that the height of the reflexive Voice further derives the obligatory subject orientation of weak reflexives, under the assumption that the subject is the only DP within the relevant spellout domain that outscopes the reflexive Voice projection.³⁹ Thus, the reflexive in (76) can only take the subject Liz as antecedent after movement to VoiceP; binding of himself by the object Danny is only possible in a derivation without reflexive Voice.

In short, Ahn (2015) distinguishes between two types of reflexive constructions, which can be diagnosed by their prosody in maximally broad-focus contexts in positions normally bearing nuclear phrasal stress: those that involve a reflexive Voice head (where the reflexive is weak) and those that do not (where the reflexive is strong). The former are only possible in contexts of local subject-oriented reflexivity (or LSOR, in Ahn’s terms), whereas the latter are possible in the complement set of these contexts. Crucially, the dividing line between LSOR and non-LSOR constructions does not rely on the position occupied by reflexives. Certainly, there are positions that systematically exclude LSOR reflexives (e.g. within an island excluding the antecedent, as in (72)) and others that systematically exclude non-LSOR reflexives (e.g. direct object of a verb, as in (71)). But there are also positions that are compatible with both LSOR or non-LSOR reflexives, such as the indirect object position in configurations like (76); in those cases, the difference between LSOR and non-LSOR anaphors is interpretive: weak reflexives are subject-oriented, while strong reflexives are object-oriented.

3.1.1.3 Ahn’s overgeneration of logophoric anaphors

Returning now to our main goal of accounting for LBEs, Ahn’s (2015) analysis makes specific predictions about logophoric anaphors, even if they are not discussed. Central to this is Ahn’s (2015: 290) Rule J, a pragmatic competition principle according to which reflexive Voice must be merged if (i) its presence is grammatically possible, and (ii) its presence does not change the interpretation. Clause (i) correctly predicts the complementary distribution of LSOR and non-LSOR reflexives in configurations like (71) vs. (72)–(73) (where the stress pattern depends on the presence of islands), or (71) vs. (74)–(75) (where the stress pattern depends on the type of Voice). Clause (ii) correctly predicts the availability of both LSOR and non-LSOR reflexives in configurations like (76) (where the stress pattern depends on the interpretation of the anaphor). But while Rule J is thus able to capture examples containing descriptively plain anaphors, it falls short of capturing the distribution of descriptively exempt anaphors.

Ahn’s hypotheses imply that logophorically bound reflexives in examples like (67a) (repeated below as (79a)) are strong, as they are not local-subject oriented. As shown in (79b), such constructions are correctly permitted under Rule J: reflexive Voice cannot merge since, just like in (72a), the reflexive sits in an island (the coordinated structure) excluding its antecedent.

• (79)

  

However, the predictions Rule J makes are too weak to rule out (67b) (repeated below as (80a)). As shown in (80b), the derivation with reflexive Voice is grammatical. But as per clause (ii), it does not exclude the derivation without reflexive Voice in (a) because it does not trigger the same interpretation (cf. (76b–76c)). Contrary to facts, himself in (80a) is thus predicted to be acceptable under neutral phrasal stress.

• (80)

  

This option is not explored in Ahn (2015), which limits discussion to derivations that overtly comply with Condition A. Specifically, in the examples considered in Ahn’s analysis,⁴⁰ if a reflexive Voice is merged, only the local subject can bind the anaphor because it is the only DP above the reflexive Voice that sits within the spellout domain; and if the reflexive Voice cannot be merged, only subjects and objects within the spellout domain are potential antecedents. But crucially, the logophoric A-binder hypothesis adds a further option by introducing pro_log as a new potential binder within the spellout domain. Given that in configurations like (80), antecedence by pro_log and antecedence by the local subject yield different interpretations, both are predicted to be available, since Rule J does not force the merging of the reflexive Voice if a derivation without it does not give rise to the same meaning.⁴¹ Thus, Ahn’s (2015) account cannot derive LBEs arising in sentences like (80a).

Though Ahn’s Rule J incorrectly predicts the distribution of logophoric anaphors in English, it suggests an important ingredient to solving the LBE issue. In particular, we will argue in the next section for a different kind of competition that derives both the distribution of LSOR reflexives and LBEs in English, namely a general competition between strong and weak forms.

3.1.2 The weak/strong competition hypothesis

In Sect. 3.1.1 we introduced Ahn’s (2015) proposal distinguishing between weak and strong reflexives, which we will henceforth note ‘erself and herself, respectively. This distinction was attributed not to the reflexives themselves, but to the syntactic configuration in which they occur: weak ‘erself is associated with a reflexive Voice head to which it is attracted, but strong herself is not associated with any head.⁴² Moreover, the availability of weak ‘erself was argued to block the presence of strong herself under the same interpretation. In this section, we will explain how this distinction can help us understand why the distribution of logophoric anaphors is restricted in English. Specifically, we will propose that competition arises not only between strong and weak reflexives but, rather, between strong and weak pronominals more generally. To motivate this proposal, we will compare the English facts to the facts in French, where competition between strong and weak forms is morphologically apparent.

3.1.2.1 Insight from French

Just as English distinguishes between weak ‘erself and strong herself, French distinguishes between a weak reflexive form, se (a clitic), and a strong reflexive form, elle-même. Recall from Sect. 3.1.1.2 that Ahn’s proposal for English ‘erself was inspired by parallels with French se. Indeed, the distribution of French se is strikingly similar to that of English ‘erself since it, too, requires a local, deep subject as antecedent. It is therefore ungrammatical in the three types of configuration identified in Ahn (2015) to require herself (vs. ‘erself).⁴³ First, se cannot occur in islands excluding its antecedent as in (81).⁴⁴ This directly follows from the fact that se undergoes overt clitic movement.

• (81)

  

Second, se is incompatible with passive and raising constructions as shown in (82)–(83) (cf. (74)–(75)).⁴⁵ Under Sportiche’s (2014) hypothesis, this restriction is explained by the intrinsic properties of a Voice associated with se (cf. Labelle 2008).

• (82)

  

• (83)

  

Finally, French se is subject oriented, as illustrated in (84) (cf. (76)): se can stand for the indirect object only if anteceded by the subject; antecedence by the object requires the use of elle-même.

• (84)

  

Notice in (84a–84b) above, as well as in (85) below, that the availability of the reflexive clitic se blocks the strong reflexive elle-même in broad focus contexts (see Charnavel and Sportiche 2016: 54–55), just as the availability of ‘erself blocks herself in English (cf. (71)–(72)).

• (85)

  

As we mentioned, the striking parallel between the distribution of se and ‘erself inspired Ahn (2015) to analyze ‘erself as undergoing a clitic-like movement to a reflexive Voice. Similarly, the competition between elle-même and se should serve as a basis, we suggest (cf. Charnavel and Sportiche 2016: 57–58), for analyzing the division of roles between herself and ‘erself. Specifically, Charnavel and Sportiche (2016: 53–57) claims that the blocking of elle-même by se falls under a generalization proposed by Cardinaletti and Starke (1999): all else (relevant) being equal, if a weaker form of the target element is available, it must be used (and thus blocks the use of a stronger form). We thus hypothesize that strong herself is blocked by weak ‘erself, recasting Ahn’s (2015) Rule J as one particular subcase of a very general principle of economy driven competition between weaker and stronger forms.

This kind of competition is fully independent of Condition A; in fact, it does not only affect reflexive elements, but also pronouns and adverbs across languages. For instance, Charnavel and Sportiche (2016: 55–56) show that in French, strong pronouns like elle are also blocked by clitics, just like strong reflexives. Crucially for our purposes, Charnavel and Sportiche (2016) further show that elle-même is not only blocked by the reflexive clitic se, but also by accusative and dative clitics.⁴⁶ Thus, lui-même in (86b) (cf. himself in (67b)) is not ruled out by the availability of se, which yields a different interpretation (86c), but by that of the accusative clitic le (86a).

• (86)

  

Conversely, lui-même in (87a) (cf. himself in (67a)) is acceptable because none of the reflexive, accusative or dative clitics are.

• (87)

  

With this insight into the nature of strong/weak pronominal competition, we are finally in a position to provide an account for English LBEs, to which we now turn.

3.1.2.2 Accounting for LBEs

As foreshadowed above, we propose that a general strong/weak competition principle derives both the distribution of descriptively plain herself vs. ‘erself and the distribution of descriptively exempt (i.e. logophoric) herself. Only assuming competition between herself and ‘erself, as implied by Ahn’s (2015) Rule J, remains insufficient under Cardinaletti and Starke (1999). They do not explicitly take into account interpretation, but their proposal implies that competition should only arise if the weak form can induce the same interpretation as the strong form. The unavailability of logophoric herself in (80) thus requires enrichment of the set of competitors involved.

The data in (86) revealed that, in French, competition applies not only between strong and weak reflexive forms, but between strong and weak pronominals generally. We propose to extend this line of analysis to English: the strong reflexive himself in (67b)⁴⁷ (repeated below as (88b)) is not blocked by the weak reflexive, which yields a different interpretation (see (88c) repeating (80b)), but by the weak pronoun ‘im as shown in (88a) (cf. French (86a)). Just as non-reflexive clitics appear in the same environments as reflexive clitics in French, weak pronouns in English have indeed been shown to be confined to the environments that host weak reflexives (cf. Zwicky 1986; Wallenberg 2007; i.a.).

• (88) What happened at the party?

  • a. Max_i boasted that the queen invited ‘im_i for a drink.

  • b. *Max_i boasted that the queen invited himself_i for a drink.

  • c. Max_i boasted that [the queen]_k invited ‘erself_k for a drink.

However, the strong reflexive himself is acceptable in (67a) (repeated as (89a)) because the LSOR reflexive is ungrammatical and the weak pronoun is infelicitous in broad focus contexts.⁴⁸

• (89) What happened at the party?

  • a. Max_i boasted that the queen invited Lucie and himself_i for a drink.

  • b. *Max_i boasted that [the queen]_k invited Lucie and ‘erself_k for a drink.

  • c. #Max_i boasted that the queen invited Lucie and ‘im_i for a drink.

Thus, the addition of the weak pronoun, alongside the weak reflexive, as a competitor to the strong reflexive, solves the LBE issue in the verbal domain.

Before coming back to the nominal domain and PNAs, some clarifications are in order. First, it is worth noting that the reflexive morpheme (i.e. French -même, English -self) does not seem to be taken into account when evaluating the weight of competing elements. Strong reflexives (French elle-même; English herself) behave like strong pronouns (French elle; English her) with respect to weak/strong competition: as shown in Table 4, strong forms do not block each other, and each is blocked by clitics or weak pronouns (see Charnavel and Sportiche 2016: 55–56). This is unsurprising under the movement-based account we adopt, which yields a distinction between forms that move (clitics and weak pronominals) and forms that do not move (the other pronominal forms). We will nevertheless not fully derive this hypothesis here, which is not directly relevant to our purposes: through morphological distinctions, French unambiguously shows that elle-même and elle behave similarly with respect to competition; it is sufficient to extend this empirical generalization to English.

Table 4 Classes of competing pronominal elements in French and English

Second, it is also worth noting that while adopting the same parsimony-based approach as in the previous section, we have done so in reverse. In Sect. 2, we started from the widespread observation that plain and exempt anaphors exhibit some systematic differences in their distribution, which have led some to postulate homophony; we then unified them by hypothesizing that the differences in their behavior do not come from their lexical entries, but derive from the nature of their binder (esp. overt binders vs. implicit pro_log). In this section, we conversely started with the null hypothesis that English plain reflexives form a homogeneous class; based on Ahn’s (2015) discovery, we then showed that they actually exhibit systematic differences in their prosody. Just as before, we do not want to imply that herself and ‘erself are homophonous: the particular behavior of ‘erself comes from movement triggered by the presence of another implicit element (Ahn’s reflexive Voice), which, due to its properties, can only occur in some syntactic configurations in which it can yield prosodic effects. Thus, we assume that neither plain herself and exempt herself, nor weak ‘erself and strong herself, have different lexical entries. This does not mean though that other languages cannot display different lexical entries for marking similar differences. Morphological distinction between plain and exempt anaphors seems to be documented in some languages (e.g. zichzelf vs. hemzelf in Dutch, see Rooryck and Vanden Wyngaerd 2011), which implies that some anaphors may be lexically specified with respect to (non)logophoricity (see Charnavel 2020a, 2020b). We take the morphological distinction between French se and French elle-même to suggest a similar pattern: association with the reflexive Voice is lexically marked in French se, unlike in English ‘erself.

Finally, as should have been clear, we use the weak/strong terminology (and the ‘er(self)/her(self) notation) in the same way with pronouns and with reflexives. The prosodic difference between the pronouns her and ‘er, just like that between herself and ‘erself, only surfaces when they are in a syntactic position requiring phrasal stress in neutral contexts. Otherwise, strong her, like herself, can surface as weak (e.g. when it is given); conversely, weak ‘er, like ‘erself, can surface as strong (e.g. when it is focused).⁴⁹ This hypothesis raises the question of the source of the difference between her and ‘er. It cannot rely on movement to a specific Voice head as Ahn (2015) argues for reflexives, but we similarly hypothesize that the difference is structural and can be specified in light of French. In French, even if only se is associated with a reflexive voice, accusative la and dative lui also qualify as clitics. We likewise assume (cf. Wallenberg 2007) that weak ‘er, unlike strong her but like ‘erself, undergoes some clitic-like movement corresponding to the kind of movement that Cardinaletti and Starke (1999) hypothesize for weak pronouns; they indeed propose a three-way distinction between strong pronouns, weak pronouns and clitics, which correlates with a three-way distinction between various movement spans.⁵⁰ Fully motivating this hypothesis is beyond the scope of this article, but we will provide some additional support for it in Sect. 3.2.1.

In sum, LBEs arise from the fact that logophorically bound herself cannot occur in positions that can host weak pronominal elements—just like French logophorically bound elle-même cannot occupy cliticizable positions (cf. Italian se in Napoli 1979). And this fact derives from the hypothesis—fully independent from Condition A—that due to a general principle of competition between weaker and stronger forms, herself is systematically excluded from configurations in which a weaker form (‘erself or ‘er) is acceptable and can yield the same interpretation.

Due to Condition B ruling out pronouns in some local configurations, plain herself (cf. French elle-même) can sometimes appear in positions that can in principle host weak elements, when none of the weak elements can give rise to the relevant interpretation; this is for example the case when herself is an indirect object bound by the object, as shown in (76c) repeated as (90a).

• (90)

  • a. Liz_i assigned Danny_k to himself_k.

  • b. *Liz_i assigned Dánny_k to ‘imself_k.

  • c. *Liz_i assigned Dánny_k to ‘im_k.

Logophorically bound herself, however, can never appear in such positions, as shown in (91), because her and ‘er cover the full range of non-local interpretations that exclude descriptively plain herself: an anaphor whose only potential local binder is pro_log can always alternate with a pronoun.⁵¹ When the alternating pronoun is weak (as in (91c)), the logophorically bound anaphor is excluded. Therefore, logophorically bound anaphors are acceptable only in positions excluding weak elements.

• (91)

  • a. *Liz_i said that they assigned Danny_k to herself_i.

  • b. *Liz_i said that they assigned Danny_k to ‘erself_i.

  • c. Liz_i said that they assigned Danny_k to ‘er_i.

3.2 The logophoric blocking effect in the nominal domain

Recall that we have made a detour and delved into LBEs in the verbal domain in order to ultimately return to our main goal consisting in explaining the behavior of PNAs. In this section, we will examine the consequences of the weak/strong competition in the nominal domain, which will allow us to provide a full picture of the PNA behavior. By further specifying the set of positions that exclude logophorically bound herself, we will break the similarity between French and English and (descriptively) reintegrate the notion of coargumenthood into the picture.

3.2.1 Refining the reflexive projection associated with ‘erself

In the previous section, we concluded that logophorically bound anaphors are blocked by clitic-like elements under the same interpretation. Using again French as a clue for understanding English, it seems that such blocking effects should be irrelevant in the nominal domain. Reflexive, accusative and dative clitics are indeed all banned from the nominal domain as they need to move to a position in the tense field. Assuming that weak pronominal elements in English are similar to French clitics, as suggested by the facts so far, it should follow that neither ‘erself, nor ‘er should be licensed within DPs, thus never blocking logophorically bound herself.

As shown in Ahn (2015: 129–132), this is incorrect: even when they are the most deeply embedded element in a broad focus context, DP-internal anaphors need not bear phrasal stress (cf. Helke 1970: 114, 126–128). This fact alone is not sufficient to question the comparison between French and English though, as shown by (92)–(93) (cf. (6a)).

• (92) Tell me something about your classmates.

  Lucie_i likes pictures of ‘erself_i.

• (93)

  

In (92), ‘erself is acceptable within the picture noun phrase, unlike the French reflexive clitic in (93b). But this does not necessarily imply that ‘erself moves to a DP-internal reflexive voice. Given that ‘erself does not sit in an island, as shown by (94) below, movement to the verbal reflexive voice is possible and it is predicted to induce weak prosody on ‘erself. In other words, the clitic counterpart to a DP-internal weak reflexive should not necessarily appear within the DP, but could also be a clitic appearing in its standard position. The reason why this option is also unavailable in French, as shown by (93c), is due to an independent difference between French and English pertaining to constraints on extraction illustrated in (94)–(95): extraction out of the picture noun phrase requires pied-piping of the preposition in French, unlike in English.

• (94) Who does she like pictures of?

• (95)

  

But crucially, Ahn shows that DP-internal ‘erself can also exhibit weak prosody even when movement to the verbal reflexive voice is impossible. This is for example the case in (96):

• (96) What happened in art class yesterday?

  • a. Lucie_i showed Pete_k pictures of ‘imself_k.

  • b. Pete_k was shown pictures of ‘imself_k.  (cf. Ahn 2015: 131)

(96a) cannot involve movement to the main clause VoiceP since the binder of the reflexive is the object, not the subject; a derivation including the verbal reflexive Voice is also excluded in (96b) since it is a passive construction.⁵² Although he leaves for further research a more detailed investigation of DP-internal reflexives, Ahn (2015: 131) concludes from these facts that the binder of ‘imself must be some DP-internal local subject here, and that a reflexive Voice can therefore be present within DPs.

This hypothesis is further supported, Ahn suggests, by the interpretation of DP-internal weak reflexives: for instance, (97) entails Jack writing the letter.

• (97) Jack_i found a letter to ‘imself_i.  (Ahn 2015: 131)

To account for the distributional differences between English ‘erself and French se, Ahn (2015) in effect proposes that the reflexive Voice has a broader distribution in English than in French. According to him, facts such as (96)–(97) above entail that the reflexive Voice can occur within DPs; facts in (98)–(99) below further imply that it can appear within small clauses, even non–verbal ones unlike in French (see (100)–(101)).

• (98) What happened during the writer’s meeting yesterday?

  • a. #Jenna made Patrice proud of himsélf.

  • b. Jenna made Patrice próud of himself.  (Ahn 2015: 120)

• (99) What happened during the writer’s meeting yesterday?

  • a. #Pete saw Liz burn hersélf.

  • b. Pete saw Liz búrn herself.  (cf. Ahn 2015: 119)

• (100)

  

• (101)

  

In both (98)–(99), the English reflexive, which is bound by the small clause subject, is weak. However, French se is only available within verbal small clauses such as (101). Other types of small clauses, such as the adjectival small clause in (100), can only host strong reflexives. The parallel between French se and English ‘erself thus seems to break down here. Instead of assuming an idiosyncratic distribution for the English reflexive Voice, we take these facts to reveal that the head attracting ‘erself can’t literally be a Voice head, which associates only with verbs; it must be a reflexive head compatible with adjectives and nouns.

Such a head is more transparently relevant in another English construction. Reflexivity within nominals or within small clauses does not always require the weak reflexive ‘erself as in (96)–(98) above, but in some lexically restricted cases, it can be expressed with a different kind of element, namely self-, as illustrated in (102)–(103). We thus hypothesize that the head attracting ‘erself is similar to that associated with self- and we will henceforth call it self.⁵³ Movement to self within nominals is illustrated in (104) representing (97).

• (102) What happened during the writer’s meeting yesterday?

  Jenna made Patrice self-critical.

• (103) What happened in art class yesterday?

  Lucie showed Pete his self-portrait.

• (104) Jack found a [himself self [letter to himself]].

Our hypothesis is that ‘erself must move to an abstract head self, which like self-, can be present in verbal, nominal and adjectival domains, and unlike self-, is not restricted lexically. In other words, our head self remains similar to Ahn’s (2015) reflexive Voice in many respects, but it is crucially not a Voice head, which accounts for its broader distribution than French se outside the verbal domain.

At the same time, we argue that by replacing refl Voice with self, we do not lose the explanation for the restricted distribution of ‘erself in the verbal domain, namely its deep subject orientation as well as its exclusion from islands (see (73)–(76)). To understand why, comparison with French is again revealing. French also has a head that, like self-, can express reflexivity within nominals or within adjectives in some lexically restricted cases, namely auto- (see Labelle 2008; Sportiche 2014; i.a.) as illustrated in (105)–(106).

• (105)

  

• (106)

  

Crucially, when this head occurs in the verbal domain, it is obligatorily associated with the reflexive clitic se as shown in (107).

• (107)

  

Therefore, all distributional properties observed with se directly apply to auto-, as illustrated in (108)–(110) (cf. (81), (82) and (84), respectively).

• (108)

  

• (109)

  

• (110)

  

We do not here aim at explaining such obligatory association of auto- with se, which is beyond the scope of this article (for some discussion, see Labelle 2008; Sportiche 2014; i.a.). But we take it as a clue explaining the distribution of English ‘erself: ‘erself exhibits a distribution that is similar to se in the verbal domain, but broader otherwise, because it must move to a head, self, that is not a Voice head itself, but directly interacts with Voice in the verbal domain. We leave the details for future research, but will henceforth assume, as summarized below, that self is similar to (se)auto in entailing local deep subject orientation and not being restricted to the verbal domain.

• (111) Relevant properties of the reflexive head self:

  • a. Obligatorily attracts ‘erself (and self-)

  • b. Entails local deep subject orientation

  • c. Can appear in verbal, adjectival and nominal domains

This hypothesis has a further welcome consequence. Recall that under our hypothesis, herself competes not only with ‘erself, but also with ‘er, so that understanding the distribution of weak pronouns is crucial to predict the distribution of logophorically bound herself. As a first pass, we compared ‘er with French accusative and dative clitics la/lui, whose distribution is similar to that of se in the sense that they all originate from non-nominative structurally case-marked positions.⁵⁴ As suggested by our examples so far, this generalization applies to ‘er in the verbal domain. But crucially, the distribution of ‘er in small clauses and DPs raises the same issue as ‘erself as shown in (112)–(115).

• (112) Pete_i’s colleagues made his wife proud of ‘im_i.

• (113) His_i wife showed us pictures of ‘im_i.

• (114)

  

• (115)

  

While la/lui are excluded from non-verbal small clauses (e.g. (114)) and from DPs (e.g. (115)), ‘er is available in both (e.g. (112)–(113)). The distribution of ‘er is thus similar to that of ‘erself in displaying the same kind of distribution as clitics in the verbal domains, but in also appearing outside the verbal domain. Of course, the solution cannot rely on self itself, which is only associated with reflexive interpretations, just like the distribution of la/lui does not rely on the reflexive voice associated with se. But we assume that ‘er belongs to the same paradigm as ‘erself just like la/lui belong to the same paradigm as se, and each paradigm is associated with a certain type of movement: clitic movement for se/la/lui, weak pronoun movement for ‘er/‘erself. Recall indeed from Sect. 3.1.2.2 that Cardinaletti and Starke (1999) assumes a three-way distinction between strong pronouns, weak pronouns and clitics, and propose that weak pronouns undergo a shorter movement than clitics. This hypothesis is fully compatible with the English facts reviewed so far (cf. Zwicky 1986; Wallenberg 2007), and allows us to understand both the similarities and the differences between French la/lui/se and English ‘er/‘erself. In sum, we hypothesize that ‘er and ‘erself are weak forms rather than clitics, and thus undergo shorter movements, which explains why they can occur not only in the verbal domain, but also in nominal and adjectival domains.⁵⁵ But in all domains, we observe that the distribution of ‘er/‘erself is similar to that of la/lui/se in being restricted to non-nominative structurally case-marked positions (where, for our descriptive purposes, we take genitive positions to be structurally case-marked).

• (116) Weak vs. strong pronouns in English:

  • a. English pronouns divide into strong forms—her and herself—and weak forms—‘er and ‘erself.

  • b. Unlike strong forms, weak forms undergo short movements, which restricts them to non-nominative structurally case-marked positions, by hypothesis.

We are thus now in a position to partly reintegrate the notion of coargumenthood into the picture. Recall from Sect. 2 that defining Condition A and exemption from it based on the notion of coargumenthood, as PBTs do, is not tenable. But the discussion above reveals that at least descriptively, the notion of coargumenthood (with a subject, in particular) is partly relevant to understanding contrasts like (67a–67b), which motivated PBTs. Logophorically bound herself is blocked by ‘er/‘erself, which can only appear in non-nominative structurally case-marked positions. It follows that logophorically bound herself is excluded from positions with syntactic coargumental subjects, since positions with a syntactic coargumental subject are necessarily non-nominative structurally case-marked positions.⁵⁶ The relevance of coargumenthood to reflexives is thus twofold: on the one hand, plain ‘erself must be bound by a syntactic coargumental subject; on the other hand, exempt herself is ruled out in the presence of a syntactic coargumental subject. Crucially though, the relevance of coargumenthood to the distribution of reflexives is fully independent of Condition A and exemption from it, unlike what PBTs argue. First, the coargumental subject orientation of ‘erself certainly entails compliance with Condition A, but it is distinct from Condition A, since plain herself (unlike ‘erself) is not subject to this requirement, but only to Condition A. Second, the blocking of exempt herself by the presence of a coargumental subject derives from competition with weak forms, which falls under a general principle of competition fully independent of Condition A.⁵⁷

These observations confirm that the notion of coargumenthood as such is irrelevant to the distribution of reflexives, even if it is descriptively useful in stating the generalizations pertaining to the distribution of ‘erself and logophorically bound herself summarized in (117).

• (117) The descriptive relevance of coargumenthood for English reflexives:

  • a. LSORs: ‘erself must be bound by a syntactic coargument subject.

  • b. LBEs: logophorically bound herself is ruled out in the presence of a syntactic coargument subject.

3.2.2 Consequences for possessed PNAs (first pass)

Now that we have established a precise generalization about LBEs and showed that they derive from a competition principle fully independent of Condition A, we can explore the consequences for the distribution of PNAs. In Sect. 2, we have shown that PNAs, just like any other anaphor, can be bound by any local binder, including the possessor (if present) and pro_log (under the appropriate discourse conditions) as exemplified in (118)–(121) (repeating (18), (36b), (1) and (55), respectively).

• (118) [The witty play]_i inspired a parody of itself_i.

• (119) Mary polishes [the castle]_i’s replica of itself_i.

• (120) Tom_i believes that [pro_log-i there is a picture of himself_i hanging in the post office].

• (121) Hannah_i found [pro_log-i Peter_k’s picture of herself_i].

Now, the empirical generalizations in (117) have a twofold implication: if the PNA has a coargumental subject, it must be bound by it and cannot be logophorically bound; neither holds if the PNA lacks a coargumental subject. This gives new importance to the discussion in Sect. 2.1.2 about the status of the possessor. Recall that while the Chomskian theory uniformly treats the possessor as a binding domain boundary, different versions of PBTs make different claims about the argumental status of the possessor, which make different predictions about the plain/exempt status of PNAs. Further recall that the inanimacy-based tool supported the Chomskian view, in that the acceptability of possessed PNAs does not depend on the status of the possessor (and therefore not on the type of noun head, as implied by late PBT versions), but on its perspectival properties as predicted by the logophoric A-binder hypothesis. But now, the argumental status of the possessor becomes relevant again since LBEs depend on it in the nominal domain: according to (117), LBEs in picture noun phrases should only arise if the possessor counts as a coargumental subject for the PNA in the relevant sense.

In our view, the controversy about the status of the possessor results from a confusion. As stated in (122), the so-called possessor, which we will henceforth call genitive to avoid any further confusion, can correspond to various underlying positions: the subject of NP or any other source (object of NP, possessor, etc.), which end up in the same surface position in English (see Stowell 1989; Giorgi and Longobardi 1991; Longobardi 2001; i.a.).

• (122) Ambiguity of the genitive in English:

  In English, a genitive DP realizes the subject of NP or other types of (quasi)arguments (complements, possessor).

Only the subject of NP qualifies as a coargumental subject for PNAs. The relevant question is thus to determine whether the genitive counts as the subject of NP or not. The interpretation of the genitive, we hypothesize, can provide a crucial clue: if it specifically depends on the denotation of the noun (just like the interpretation of a verbal subject depends on the interpretation of the verb), it can be a subject of NP; it cannot if it stands in some other relation (e.g. possession) to the noun.

For nominalizations (e.g. examination), this hypothesis (inspired by Grimshaw 1990⁵⁸) predicts that when the nominalization denotes a process (complex event nominal), the genitive is construed as the specifically relevant actor of the process (e.g. the examiner) and thus qualifies as an argument, i.e. the subject, of the noun; but when the nominalization denotes a result (result nominal), the genitive is compatible with several modifier readings (e.g. the possessor, author or taker of the exam) and thus does not necessarily qualify as the subject of the noun. This hypothesis accounts for LBEs in examples like (31b)/(64) or (33a)/(65) repeated below.

• (123) *The fact that Mary_k’s description of himself_i was flawless was believed to be disturbing John_i.

• (124) *Jill_i found Matt_k’s fear of herself_i surprising.

In (123), Mary is intended to be interpreted as the agent of the act of describing John. Under our hypothesis, this implies that Mary originates as the subject of NP, thus blocking the logophoric binding of himself.⁵⁹ Similarly, Matt in (124) is construed as the experiencer of the feeling of fear and thus counts as the subject of NP, which gives rise to a LBE for herself.

Conversely, PNAs in result nominals are predicted to be licensed by logophoric binding as confirmed by (125), which contrasts with (123).

• (125) John confessed that the media’s descriptions of himself are always disturbing to him.

In (125), the noun description is pluralized, which according to Grimshaw, is incompatible with the process reading. This implies that the NP need not have a subject here, so that logophoric binding is possible. As its antecedent John is appropriately construed as the logophoric center in (125) (vs. (123); see fn. 59), himself is thus correctly predicted to be licensed.

Returning now to picture NPs in the narrow sense (recall fn. 3), we hypothesize in (126) that the genitive can qualify as the subject of a picture NP when it is interpreted as the creator (cf. Chomsky 1986; Asudeh and Keller 2001; Davies and Dubinsky 2003; Jaeger 2004; Ahn 2015; i.a.). By creator, we mean the agent responsible for the informational content (of the entity) denoted by the noun, such as a photographer or painter (in the case of picture or portrait) or an author, writer or teller (in the case of book or story), for example. We further hypothesize (pace Davies and Dubinsky 2003; Runner 2007) that this holds whether the picture noun is interpreted as concrete or result (see discussion in fn. 65). Like Runner (2007) (inspired by Davies and Dubinsky 2003; see fn. 21), we thus distinguish between two possible types of argument structure for picture nouns (i.e. picture nouns with or without subjects), but unlike Runner (2007), we do not take this difference to correlate with the concrete/result distinction (see further details in the next section).

• (126) Subject of picture nouns:

  The subject of a picture noun phrase (when there is one) must be interpreted as the creator of informational content of the entity denoted by the noun.

This hypothesis is not sufficient to account for the contrast in (61) repeated below in (127).

• (127)

  • a. ✓/?Joe_i destroyed Harry_k’s book about himself_i.

  • b. ?/*Joe_i wrote Harry_k’s book about himself_i.

The creator interpretation of Harry is possible only in (127a) given that the creator must be Joe in (127b) due to the presence of the creation verb. Under our current hypothesis, we would thus expect the contrast to go in the other direction: the logophoric interpretation of himself as Joe could be blocked by the subject interpretation of Harry only in (127a), not in (127b). As we will see in Sect. 3.2.4, the actual contrast is due to several additional factors interacting with our hypothesis: the possible implicitness of subjects of NP, the obligatoriness vs. optionality of subjects of NP depending on the environment, and the fact that in English, a subject of NP and a possessor cannot be realized simultaneously if they are disjoint. To explain these factors, we first need to examine the consequences of the generalizations in (117) for possessorless PNAs.

3.2.3 Consequences for possessorless PNAs

At the beginning of Sect. 3, we mentioned that we would start with LBEs in the verbal domain because the nominal domain presents additional complexities. One is the ambiguity of the genitive (as subject of NP or not) discussed in the previous section. A second one is the availability of silent subjects in NPs, which has no counterpart in the finite verbal domain in English. Recall that we have so far circumvented the issue (which we briefly discussed in connection with Chomsky’s (1986) PRO-based hypothesis at the beginning of Sect. 2.1.1.1) by avoiding agentive interpretations of possessorless PNAs, i.e. interpretations under which they refer to the creator of the entity denoted by the picture noun. We are now in a position to tackle the issue.

Under the hypothesis that the subject of NP can be covert—which we will henceforth call pro_subj⁶⁰—generalizations (117a–117b) entail that in the presence of pro_subj, pro_subj must bind the PNA, thus blocking any other binding, in particular by pro_log.⁶¹ In other words, the presence of pro_subj forces the PNA to be weak ‘erself referring to the creator of the informational content of the entity denoted by the picture noun; a possessorless PNA can only be strong herself in the absence of pro_subj.

Thus, generalization (117a) first predicts that a possessorless PNA that is descriptively exempt can be acceptable even if it is not logophoric, as long as it refers to the creator of its picture noun. This prediction is borne out in example (128).

• (128) Context: The Mars rover took hundreds of pictures with a camera attached to its extendable arm.

  A picture of itself_i shows [the Mars rover]_i near the rim of Gale Crater.

Here, itself lacks an overt local binder and cannot be logophorically bound since it is inanimate. (128) is nevertheless acceptable in contrast to all previous examples of inanimate possessorless PNAs without an overt local binder in Sect. 2.1.1.3. This directly follows from the hypothesis that itself is locally bound by pro_subj, which denotes the creator as represented in (129).⁶²

• (129) A pro_subj-i picture of itself_i shows [the Mars rover]_i near the rim of Gale Crater.

The contrast between (128) and previous examples with inanimate possessorless PNAs thus corroborates previous independent arguments of the literature to support the hypothesis that NPs can have silent subjects that must denote the agent (cf. Chomsky 1986; Roeper 1987; Giorgi and Longobardi 1991; Landau 2013; Ahn 2015; i.a.; pace Williams 1985; i.a.).⁶³

Under this hypothesis, generalization (117b) furthermore predicts LBEs within nominals. But the details of the prediction are complicated by another difficulty specific to the nominal domain: it is often assumed that subjects of NP do not systematically project syntactically. For example, Chomsky’s (1986) argument about (3)–(4) implies that pro_subj projects only optionally in expressions like hear stories about (i.e. hear (pro_subj) stories about). Under our hypothesis, LBEs only arise for possessorless PNAs in configurations where pro_subj obligatorily projects; logophoric binding should still be possible if pro_subj is only optionally present. The distribution of LBEs thus has the potential to clarify the conditions under which pro_subj is present.

In fact, the experimental findings presented in Bryant and Charnavel (2020) reveal two configurations forcing the projection of pro_subj: nouns with goal arguments (e.g. letter to) and complements of creation verbs (e.g. write a book about) as illustrated in (130)–(131) vs. (132).⁶⁴

• (130)

  • a. Context: While writing up her to-do list for the day, Lea accidentally bumped her glass of water.

    The water Lea_i splashed smeared the note to herself_i.

  • b. Context: While reading a note her husband left for her on the dresser, Lea accidentally bumped her glass of water.

    *The water Lea_i splashed smeared the note to herself_i.   (cf. Bryant and Charnavel 2020: 11)

• (131) [Lea_i’s brother]_k painted the picture of {*herself_i / himself_k}.   (cf. Bryant and Charnavel 2020: 12)

• (132)

  • a. Context: While developing a photo she took, Lea accidentally bumped her glass of water.

    The water Lea_i splashed smeared the picture of herself_i.

  • b. Context: While developing a couple of photos taken by her husband on their honeymoon, Lea accidentally bumped her glass of water.

    The water Lea_i splashed smeared the picture of herself_i.   (cf. Bryant and Charnavel 2020: 12)

In (130), herself is only acceptable if the referent of its antecedent, Lea, is interpreted as the creator, namely if Lea wrote the note; whether she is interpreted as the logophoric center or not is irrelevant (both contexts are compatible with this interpretation but do not force it). This follows from generalization (117b) if pro_subj obligatorily projects when the picture noun takes a goal argument as shown in (133a–133b) representing (130a–130b) respectively.⁶⁵

• (133)

  • a. The water Lea_i splashed smeared [the (pro_log-i/k) pro_subj-i note to ‘erself_i].

  • b. *The water Lea_i splashed smeared [the (pro_log-i) pro_subj-k note to herself_i].

By contrast, herself is acceptable in (132a–132b) under a logophoric reading whether or not the antecedent is construed as the creator, as shown in (134a–134b) (representing (132a–132b) respectively). This follows from generalization (117b) if pro_subj only optionally projects when the picture noun takes a theme argument as represented.

• (134)

  • a. The water Lea_i splashed smeared [the (pro_log-i/k) (pro_subj-i) picture of (h)erself_i].

  • b. The water Lea_i splashed smeared [the pro_log-i (*pro_subj-k) picture of herself_i].

The hypothesis of a difference between nouns with theme arguments and those with goal arguments with respect to pro_subj projection is further supported by the contrast between (135) and (136), which at first glance seems to involve local binding rather than logophoric binding.⁶⁶

• (135)

  • a. Context: Ellis wrote himself a letter filled with words of encouragement.

    Ellis_i enjoyed the letter to himself_i.

  • b. Context: Ellis’s older sister wrote letters to everyone in their family.

    *Ellis_i enjoyed the letter to himself_i.

• (136)

  • a. Context: Ellis took several photos at his family reunion.

    Ellis_i liked the picture of himself_i.

  • b. Context: Ellis’s older sister painted portraits of everyone in their family.

    Ellis_i liked the picture of himself_i.

Even if Ellis seems to superficially qualify as a local binder for the PNA, himself cannot be bound by it in (135b) when Ellis is not the creator. As shown in (137a–137b), this directly follows from the obligatory presence of pro_subj: as the presence of pro_subj turns the picture noun phrase into the binding domain, Ellis is in fact not a possible local binder for himself; only pro_subj and pro_log are. But due to generalization (117b), logophoric binding of himself is blocked. Thus, himself is only acceptable if it refers to the letter writer.

• (137)

  • a. Ellis_i enjoyed [the (pro_log-i/k) pro_subj-i letter to ‘imself_i].

  • b. * Ellis_i enjoyed [the (pro_log-i/k) pro_subj-k letter to himself_i].

However, himself in (136) is acceptable whether or not its antecedent is interpreted as the creator as expected under representations (138a–138b).

• (138)

  • a. Ellis_i liked [the (pro_log-i/k) (pro_subj-i) picture of (h)imself_i].

  • b. Ellis_i liked [the (pro_log-i/k) (*pro_subj-k) picture of himself_i].

Example (131a–131b) above (represented in (139a–139b) below) further reveals that optionality vs. obligatoriness of pro_subj projection does not only depend on the type of complement taken by the noun, but also on the broader syntactic context. Under our hypothesis, the contrast between (131a) and (131b) thus implies that a verb of creation like paint or write entails pro_subj projection in its complement as shown in (139a–139b).

• (139)

  • a. *[Lea_i’s brother]_k painted [the (pro_log-i/k) pro_subj-k picture of herself_i].

  • b. [Lea_i’s brother]_k painted [the (pro_log-i/k) pro_subj-k picture of ‘imself_k].

The reason why the PNA here must refer to Lea’s brother is that the picture noun phrase obligatorily involves pro_subj anteceded by the subject of the creation verb painted. Given generalizations (117a–117b), the PNA must therefore be bound by pro_subj (‘imself in (139b)); it cannot be logophorically bound (herself in (139a)).⁶⁷

In sum, the results of our examination of LBEs in the verbal domain have allowed us to refine the empirical generalizations that we made about possessorless PNAs in Sect. 2: we have added one further possible local binder for PNAs, namely pro_subj, and we have restricted the availability of logophoric binding (or any binding by a binder different from pro_subj) to configurations lacking pro_subj. We have thereby shed further light on the conditions under which subjects of NPs syntactically project in English as summarized in (140)–(141).

• (140) Implicitness of subjects of NPs: the availability of pro_subj in English:

  Subjects of NPs can be implicit in English.

• (141) Obligatoriness vs. optionality of subjects in English picture NPs:

  • a. Subjects of picture NPs must be syntactically represented in English when the noun takes a goal argument (e.g. letter to).

  • b. Subjects of picture NPs must be syntactically represented in English when the NP is the complement of a creation verb (e.g. write a book about).

  • c. Otherwise, the syntactic projection of subjects of picture NPs is not obligatory.

Exploring the referential constraints on PNAs thus provides a new probe into the argument structure of NPs. Space limits do not allow us to further use this probe here, but we hope that it will be done in future research.⁶⁸ We also have to leave for further investigation the analysis of the generalizations established in (140)–(141). But to close the examination of possessorless PNAs, we would like to show how to further test these generalizations based on Conditions B and C by illustrating one case: experimental evidence from Conditions B and C independently supports the generalizations regarding nouns taking a goal argument ((140) and (141a)).⁶⁹

Under any definition of Condition B (i.e. under any version of Chomskian or predicate-based theories), the subject of NP is sufficiently local to its coarguments to potentially trigger Condition B effects. Generalization (141a) thus predicts that, if the goal of the noun is expressed by a pronoun, Condition B effects will occur if the pronoun also refers to the creator and, hence, corefers with the subject of NP. The contrast between (142a) and (142b) shows that this prediction is borne out: while the pronoun him can corefer with the matrix subject Jack in a context in which Jack did not write the letter (142b), coreference is not possible when Jack did write the letter and, thus, is syntactically represented as subject of NP (142a).

• (142)

  • a. Context: When Jack was young, he wrote a letter to his future self. His mom, Faye, kept the letter in her scrapbook of family mementos. Over the holidays, Jack looked through the scrapbook.

    * Jack_i tore up the letter to him_i.

  • b. Context: When Faye was young, she wrote a letter to her brother Jack. Their mom kept the letter in her scrapbook of family mementos. Over the holidays, Jack looked through the scrapbook.

    Jack_i tore up the letter to him_i.

Similarly, if the goal of the noun is expressed by a proper name, Condition C effects are predicted to arise if the name refers to the creator (e.g. letter writer) and, hence, corefers with the subject of NP. As shown by the contrast between (143a) and (143b), this prediction is likewise borne out.

• (143)

  • a. Context: When Jack was young, he wrote a letter to his future self. His mom, Faye, kept the letter in her scrapbook of family mementos. Over the holidays, Faye looked through the scrapbook.

    *Faye tore up the letter to Jack.

  • b. Context: When Faye was young, she wrote a letter to her brother Jack. Their mom, kept the letter in her scrapbook of family mementos. Over the holidays, Faye looked through the scrapbook.

    Faye tore up the letter to Jack.

To wrap up, possessorless PNAs are licensed in the absence of an overt local binder in two cases: when they are bound by pro_subj (and are thus interpreted as the creator) or when they are bound by pro_log (and are thus interpreted as the logophoric center); these two cases exclude each other as the presence of pro_subj forces the PNA to be bound by it.

3.2.4 Returning to possessed PNAs

All pieces are now in place to solve the remaining LBE issues in the nominal domain. Recall from Sect. 3.2.2. that the hypothesis that the subject of picture NPs must be construed as the creator is not sufficient to explain contrasts like (144a) vs. b (repeating (127a–127b)).

• (144)

  • a. ✓/?Joe_i destroyed Harry_k’s book about himself_i.

  • b. ?/*Joe_i wrote Harry_k’s book about himself_i.

But the conclusion we reached in (141b) about the obligatory projection of the subject in nouns complements of creation verbs provides the missing piece to the solution. Given the presence of the creation verb wrote in (144b), (141b) entails that book must have a subject denoting the creator, namely Joe (the subject of wrote) as represented in (145). Given that the genitive position is occupied by Harry, this gives rise to a conflict due to the availability of only one genitive position in English (see (122); cf. Stowell 1989; Giorgi and Longobardi 1991; Longobardi 2001; i.a.).

• (145) *Joe_i wrote [Harry_k’s pro_subj-i book about himself_i/k].

Unlike what Runner (2007) and Reuland (2011) argue (see Sect. 2.1.2.1), the ungrammaticality of (145) is thus not due to the restriction of exemption to concrete nouns (cf. fn. 65), but to the conflict between the creator and the possessor. In fact, this constraint also explains the ungrammaticality of examples like (62a) (repeated as (146)), which do not involve any reflexive.

• (146) *John_i took Mary’s pictures of him_i.  (Williams 1987: 156)

This hypothesis is further supported by the fact that himself in (145) cannot be bound by the genitive either, as shown by the similar example in (147).⁷⁰

• (147) * Gordon_i wrote Faye_k’s pro_subj-i book about herself_k.   (Bryant and Charnavel 2020: 12)

By contrast, himself can be logophorically bound in (144a) (represented in (148)) because in the absence of a creation verb, the noun book need not have a subject. Consequently, himself can also be bound by Harry, whether it is interpreted as the creator or not.⁷¹

• (148) Joe_i destroyed [pro_log-i Harry_k’s book about himself_i/k].

The same reasoning can be applied to derive the unacceptability of examples like (66) (specified below in (149a–149b)) involving goal arguments.

• (149)

  • a. Context: Chelsey gave Brandon a letter from her journal that she had written when they started dating.

    *Chelsey_i found Brandon_k’s letter to herself_i.

  • b. Context: As the first leg of a scavenger hunt designed for his daughter, Chelsey, Brandon hid a letter of instructions he wrote in the back of the pantry.

    *Chelsey_i found Brandon_k’s letter to herself_i.

In context (a) implying that Brandon did not write the letter, the ungrammaticality of (149) results from a conflict between the genitive Brandon and pro_subj, which must be syntactically represented given (141a) and refer to the letter writer (i.e. Chelsey) given (126), as represented in (150a). In context (b) in which Brandon did write the letter, no such conflict arises as Brandon originates as subject of NP, but logophoric binding of herself is blocked by the presence of the subject of NP as per generalization (117b).

• (150)

  • a. *Chelsey_i found [(pro_log-i/j) Brandon_k’s pro_subj-i letter to ‘erself_i].

  • b. *Chelsey_i found [pro_log-i Brandon_k’s Brandon_subj-k letter to herself_i].

This twofold explanation is supported by the contrast between (151a) and (151b), which does not involve logophoric binding (cf. (147)), as shown in (152a–152b).

• (151)

  • a. Context: Chelsey wrote a letter to Brandon when they started dating.

    *Chelsey_i found Brandon_k’s letter to himself_k.

  • b. Context: Brandon wrote a letter to himself without telling his girlfriend Chelsey.

    Chelsey_i found Brandon_k’s letter to himself_k.   (cf. Bryant and Charnavel 2020: 11)

• (152)

  • a. *Chelsey_i found Brandon_k’s pro_subj-i letter to himself_k.

  • b. Chelsey_i found Brandon_k’s Brandon_subj-k letter to himself_k.

Thus, several factors must be taken into account to predict the acceptability of possessed PNAs: the underlying position of the genitive (subject of NP or not), the obligatoriness or optionality of the subject of NP, the interpretation of the reflexive (logophoric or not, creator or not). Logophoric binding is blocked if the genitive originates as subject of NP, and any type of binding is ungrammatical if the genitive is not the creator in configurations requiring a subject of NP.

4 Conclusion

In sum, so-called Picture Noun Anaphors do not form a natural class: they are neither special, nor exceptional, but just like any anaphor, they systematically obey Condition A, which is a fully general principle. The reason why some instances of English PNAs—and other anaphors—seem to be exempt from it is that Condition A can be satisfied covertly. Furthermore, PNAs appear to exhibit a particularly irregular behavior because the availability of implicit binders in picture nouns is conditioned upon various interacting factors, some of which are specific to the nominal domain. Specifically, the illusion of PNA exemption results both from the possible implicitness of subjects in NPs, which must serve as binders when co-occurring with PNAs, and from the possible absence of subjects in NPs, which licenses binding by an implicit logophoric pronoun. Such apparent complementarity between subject and logophoric binding is due to a general binding-independent principle of competition between weaker and stronger forms, which regulates the availability of various potential bindees. By restricting the scope of logophoric binding, this principle obscures binding behaviors, especially in English where the weak reflexive form, which requires a coargumental subject as binder, is morphologically identical to the strong reflexive form.

The interaction of all these factors gives rise to a complex set of binding possibilities for English PNAs summarized in (153). In our view, the failure of previous theories results from overlooking at least one of these factors. In particular, ignoring the possible binding by a logophoric pronoun (pro_log) led many to incorrectly assume exemption or long distance binding; ignoring the obligatory binding by the subject of NP (overt DP or pro_subj) resulting from the weak/strong competition principle led PBTs to wrongly build coargumenthood into Condition A.

• (153)

  

In identifying all the various factors at play and specifying how they interact with each other, we hope to have solved the PNA puzzle in English without compromising on parsimony. For our investigation, we have used a toolkit inspired from the results of various recent works: for example, Charnavel and Sportiche’s (2016) inanimacy-based tool, Ahn’s (2015) prosodic diagnostics, Charnavel’s (2020a, 2020b) logophoric tests, Bryant and Charnavel’s (2020) contextual control of genitive interpretations. While we have restricted our focus to English, we believe that this toolkit could benefit future crosslinguistic studies about binding theory and beyond. As we have shown, principles of binding interact with other properties of language, and, importantly, these properties can be language-specific:⁷² for instance, the effect of competition between strong and weak forms will depend on the inventory of anaphoric and pronominal expressions available in the language, and languages may vary with respect to the structure of DPs. Hence, a careful examination of PNAs in languages other than English would first require identification of the relevant factors.

Due to the number of factors relevant to the solution, our exploration had to leave many questions for further investigation. In particular, the pro_log hypothesis has many consequences for other perspectival elements beyond anaphors that would be interesting to explore. The competition hypothesis raises several issues related to the analysis of weak pronouns and reflexives. The conclusions we reach about the conditions on subject projection in NPs would be worth further testing on the basis of anaphora-independent evidence. In sum, it seems to us that Picture Noun Anaphors still deserve specific attention, not as an exceptional class of elements, but as a probe into various questions such as the grammatical representation of perspective, the typology of pronominal elements, or the argument structure of nouns.