This article explains three known constraints on scope reconstruction—reconstruction is blocked into wh -islands, after remnant movement, and after countercyclic merger—by postulating an underlying condition on semantic reconstruction, which follows naturally from Minimalist assumptions on chain interpretation in combination with the principle of compositionality. The result is a unifying alternative analysis of the data discussed in Cresti 1995 , Fox 1999 , and Sauerland and Elbourne 2002 , among others.

Kripke (1990/2009) argues that the presupposition triggered by the additive particle too is anaphoric in nature, an influential thesis with important ramifications for the theory of presupposition. This article reexamines the empirical evidence and proposes an alternative explanation, leaving too with only its traditional existential presupposition.

Conditions on variable binding are of two types:those that (roughly) require a pronoun to be A-bound, and those that ban locally ā-bound pronouns. While the two types are usually felt to be extensionally equivalent, argue here on the basis of weakest crossover that the former type, which fits the Minimalist Program better, is also empiri cally superior.

This article investigates the proper characterization of the condition that is responsible for weak crossover effects. It argues that the relevant condition belongs to scope theory and that weak crossover arises from the way in which scope is determined in syntax. This implies that weak crossover can occur whenever an operator must take scope over a pronoun, even when the pronoun and the operator are not coindexed and the intended interpretation of the pronoun is not as a variable bound by the operator. It also implies that, when an operator is for some reason assigned scope in an exceptional manner and escapes the usual syntactic restrictions on scope assignment, bound variable licensing will be exceptionally allowed as well.