The clitic binding restriction revisited: Evidence for antilogophoricity

Abstract

In some Romance languages, including French and Spanish, there is an interesting asymmetry concerning the behavior of isolated clitics and clitic clusters with respect to coreference. In the French example Anne croit qu’on va la lui recommander pour la promotion ‘Anna thinks that they will recommend her to him for the promotion’, the accusative clitic la ‘her’ in the embedded clause cannot corefer with ‘Anne’ when a dative clitic, lui ‘to him’, co-occurs in the cluster. The only previous account of this constraint (Bhatt and Šimík 2009) attributes this to a binding restriction. Based on new data disentangling binding and logophoricity, we show that the generalization capturing the distribution of clitics clusters in French and Spanish is the following: an accusative clitic cannot be clustered with a dative clitic if the accusative clitic refers to a logophoric center and is read de se. We derive this antilogophoricity effect from perspective conflicts, which we represent as intervention effects in the presence of a single logophoric operator in the relevant domain. This analysis furthermore provides a semantic motivation for intervention effects that have been postulated for the Person-Case Constraint (PCC), which we hypothesize also derives from perspective conflicts.