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

We present an account of why disjoint reference effects obtain in verbal but not in adjectival passives. Passives in child language are independently argued to always be adjectival, which allows us to use a natural experiment in child grammar that is not available in the adult grammar: predicting the lack of a disjoint reference effect in even those passives that prima facie seem verbal. We conduct our discussion against the background of the difference between adjectival and verbal passives in general. Our account is based on (grammatical) Implicature Theory. Since the initiator in the semantic representation of adjectival passives stays at a kind level, it cannot introduce a discourse referent, hence cannot trigger a disjointness implicature, unlike the initiator in verbal passives (Gehrke 2013, 2015). We show in two experiments that children’s passives do not exhibit disjoint reference, unlike adults’ verbal passives, even though children have no trouble computing disjointness implicatures elsewhere. Our contribution thus confirms with a novel kind of evidence the syntactic nature of young children’s difficulty with verbal passives. It offers a new perspective on the external argument difference between verbal and adjectival passives based on Reinhart’s (2016) Theta System, while also offering additional evidence for a grammatical, rather than general pragmatic, theory of implicatures.

This article explains the conditions on the binding of pronouns, simplex anaphors, and complex anaphors, distinguishing the roles of the computational system, interpretive procedures, and discourse storage. It argues for a general principle of economy counting interpretive steps. Locality conditions on binding are shown to follow from this economy principle and independent principles of (minimalist) syntax, providing the means to encode certain dependencies, most economically, within the computational system. It shows that the role of complex anaphors in licensing reflexivization follows from an interpretive condition holding at the conceptual-intentional (C-I)interface.