Anaphora play a key role in syntactic theorizing, but experimental investigations of coreference – especially when using acceptability judgments – involve unique methodological challenges. Given that non-linguist participants are unlikely to be familiar with linguistic notations such as the use of subscripts, how can researchers indicate the coreference relation whose acceptability is being assessed? In other words, if a researcher wants to test whether a particular coindexation relation is acceptable, how can this information be conveyed to participants? Ignoring this issue can yield uninterpretable data. This chapter provides an in-depth discussion of different methods for indicating coreference when researchers want to elicit acceptability judgments from participants who are not trained linguists. The chapter also discusses other approaches relevant for anaphora, including antecedent-choice tasks and real-time methods (self-paced reading, eye-tracking), and explains how they differ in terms of the kind of data they yield and thus the kinds of hypotheses they can be used to investigate.

This chapter extends the assignment-variable-based analysis of headed relative constructions in Chapter 6 to quantifier phrases with nonrelative complements. Crosslinguistic diachronic, morphological, and syntactic data are examined in support of a generalized D+XP analysis. Applications of the assignment-quantificational syntax/semantics for quantifier phrases include phenomena with “specificity,” contextual domain restriction, and distinctions between modifier (“free R”) readings and argument (“inherent R”) readings of genitives. The treatment of donkey pronouns in Chapter 6 is extended to bound-variable readings, reflexives, and other types of apparent non-c-command anaphora, such as with genitive binding and inverse linking. The account’s distinction between trace-binding and pronoun-binding is exploited in a speculative account of weak crossover.

This chapter discusses anaphoric elements, i.e., reflexive and nonreflexive pronouns, their syntactic distribution, their morphological structure, and how they get their reference (their semantics). While the main goal is to give a descriptive overview, the chapter also introduces two landmark theories proposed to account for the distribution of anaphoric elements: Chomsky’s (1981, 1986) classic Binding Theory and Reinhart and Reuland’s (1993) “Reflexivity” approach. The initial concern is with the basic complementarity of reflexive and nonreflexive pronouns in English and German but also with certain instances of noncomplementarity, including logophoric uses of reflexive pronouns in English. The chapter then deals with anaphoric elements in Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic, focusing on so-called SELF versus SE anaphors, and, where applicable, also on possessive reflexives. Special attention is paid to the comparison between Dutch zichzelf and German sich (selbst).