C-command vs. scope: An experimental assessment of bound-variable pronouns

Antecedent accessibility and exceptional covariation: Evidence from Norwegian Donkey Pronouns

“…via establishing a relationship with an alternative mediating situation variable, as proposed by Moulton 2017). Moulton and Han (2018) speculated that a similar processing profile should be observed with other exceptionally co-variant dependencies, such as donkey pronouns. If this prediction is correct, then the indefinite phrase with which the donkey pronoun co-varies should not be accessible to antecedent retrieval.…”

“…Kush and colleagues concluded that the asymmetry in gendermismatch effects indicated that antecedent retrieval does not access non-c-commanding QPs that are not acceptable antecedents (see also Cunnings et al 2015). Moulton and Han (2018) pointed out that the inaccessibility of the non-c-commanding QPs in the above studies is compatible with two interpretations. The first interpretation is that retrieval uniformly ignores non-referential phrases that do not c-command a pronoun.…”

“…Under this interpretation accessibility would not be narrowly determined by syntactic scope (c-command), but rather semantic scope (see Barker 2015;Ruys & Winter 2011 for discussion of semantic scope). Moulton & Han (2018) tested the processing of exceptional covariation dependencies to tease these two possibilities apart. The authors tested the accessibility of QPs in constructions like (6a), where a pronoun (he) co-varies with a QP (each boy), even though the QP does not c-command the pronoun from within the fronted temporal adjunct.…”

“…We investigated whether the processing of donkey pronouns similarly requires the retrieval of the indefinite phrase a medal. Our investigation is motivated by the suggestion made by Moulton and colleagues (Moulton 2017;Moulton & Han 2018) that the processing of exceptionallycovariant pronouns does not involve retrieval of the feature-matching phrase with which the pronoun appears to co-vary. To preview our results, we find evidence that language users appear to access the indefinite NP as the antecedent of a donkey pronoun.…”

PP-Extraposition and Precedence

“…This second approach fits well with the recent resurgence of precede-and-command as an alternative way 2 of restricting certain dependencies. Barker (2012), for example, argues that surface c-command is too restrictive a notion to account for the full range of variable binding data in English (see also Jackendoff 1990, Ernst 1994, Williams 1997and Bruening 2014; for experimental evidence, see Moulton and Han 2018; for discussion of linear order effects in coordination, see Bruening andAl Khalaf 2016, andNevins andWeisser 2018).…”