Argument structure and animacy restrictions on anaphora1

This paper presents a new constraint, the Antecedent Closeness Constraint (ACC), which unifies the binding properties of control, Super Equi-NP constructions, picture NPs, and anaphors as specifiers of NPs (in English). The focus will be on the last three cases, which share the property of containing an anaphoric element that is exempt from binding theory (see section 4 for examples of the data under consideration).2 The formal theory I am assuming is Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG; Pollard and Sag (1987, 1994)), with the version of binding theory presented in Asudeh (1998) and briefly reviewed below. The ACC formalizes the following facts about the antecedents of these anaphors: 1) animacy of antecedents matters for these constructions; 2) order also matters: any nonexpletive nominal that commands an anaphor can be an antecedent for , so long as no animate potential antecedent is closer to than is; 3) this in effect sets up a chain composed of potential antecedents and having the anaphor as its tail: h(animate), inanimate*, anaphori. The presentation is as follows: in section 2, I quickly review some relevant HPSG binding notions; section 3 presents the ACC; finally, section 4 shows the application of the ACC to the data.