Will Nediger’s paper, entitled “Overcoming Empirical Challenges for an Extended Approach to Condition C,” is featured in the Winter 2017 volume of Linguistic Inquiry. The paper, based on his QRP, argues that apparent exceptions to Binding Condition C, including data having to do with epithets and the interaction of binding and focus, can be accounted for in a principled way in the competition-based framework proposed by Safir (2004) by adopting some independently-motivated assumptions.

This is Nediger’s first sole-authored paper in a major linguistics journal. Said Nediger, “I’m really proud of this research, so it’s great to finally see it out in the world.”

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“Overcoming Empirical Challenges for an Extended Approach to Condition C”

Abstract

Various empirical phenomena have been regarded as problematic for accounts of Condition C, including the behavior of epithets, focus constructions, and sentences where a bound R-expression can be used for the purpose of disambiguation. I argue that these problematic data can be accounted for within the competition-based framework proposed by Safir (2004), with slight modifications, including the adoption of an explicit focus semantics and of Dubinsky and Hamilton’s (1998) analysis of epithets as antilogophoric pronouns. In particular, I argue that several phenomena claimed to be pragmatic by Schlenker (2005) can be accounted for syntactically.