2.1 Perspectival anaphora: Core properties

In the realm of anaphora, the notion of perspective is perhaps typically invoked in the context of logophoric dependencies, the term “logophor” denoting a designated pro-form referring to an entity “whose speech, thoughts, feelings, or general state of consciousness are reported” (Clements 1975: 141). (3) illustrates this for Tuburi, a Chadic language (Sells 1987: 447): the plural logophor sā:rā represents the mental perspective of the sayer denoted by the matrix subject “they”:

The term has since been appropriated to refer to dependencies where the anaphor corefers with an extra-sentential nominal that denotes a discourse-salient individual from whose “inner mind” the narrative is reported, as in the free indirect discourse scenario (Banfield 1982; Schlenker 2004) from Jane Austen’s Emma (Austen 1816 Chapter XVIII, 321) in (4):

“Long-distance anaphora” — i.e. dependencies involving bound variable pro-forms that are anteceded by another nominal in the same sentence (albeit, crucially, not in the same local clause) — can also be similarly perspectival. This is illustrated by the striking contrast in the Icelandic sentences below (taken from Reuland 2001: 345):

Reuland (2001: 345), describing the sentences in (5)–(6), reports that:

“The difference in acceptability between [(5)] and [(6)] can be attributed to the fact that in [(5)] the report is made from the child’s point of view, i.e., it is the child, and not the speaker, who didn’t reveal that he/she had been taken good care of, whereas in [(6)], it is the speaker who reports that the child didn’t look as if he/she had been taken good care of.”

The role of mental perspective in long-distance anaphora has been observed for a range of other languages (see e.g. Koopman & Sportiche 1989; Pearson 2013; Kuno 1987; Oshima 2007; Bianchi 2003; Giorgi 2010; Jayaseelan 1997 for data and discussion on Abe, Ewe, Japanese, Italian, and Malayalam, respectively). Anaphoric dependencies may be governed by their sensitivity to spatial perspective, as well, as in Norwegian where “the simple reflexive [seg] is used when the physical aspect of the referent of the binder is in focus” (Lødrup 2007: 183; see also Rooryck & vanden Wyngaerd 2011 for data and discussion on the role of spatial perspective in Dutch anaphora). This is nicely illustrated in the pairing below, involving the preposition mot which is homophonous between a spatial vs. a more abstract, non-spatial meaning:

The simplex seg form is used only when the preposition is interpreted as spatial, and its antecedent is obligatorily interpreted as the spatial perspective-holder with respect to the spatial PP containing the anaphor. In all other cases, seg selv is used, making this form the elsewhere case. In the rest of the paper, I label all pro-form dependencies where the antecedence of the pro-form is regulated by perspective, in the manner illustrated above, as instances of “perspectival anaphora” and the pro-form in question in each case as a “perspectival anaphor”.

Finally, it has been pointed out that perspectival anaphors in languages like Japanese (Kuno 1973; Nishigauchi 2014) are subject to an “awareness condition”. Kuno (1973: 322) describes that the Japanese anaphor zibun in a subordinate clause may corefer with another nominal in the matrix only if the former “represents an action or state that the referent of [the nominal] is aware of at the time it takes place or has come to be aware of at some later time.” Thus, Japanese zibun is licit in (8) where Takasi is aware of the election happening, but not in (9), where he is asleep, and therefore not (Nishigauchi 2014: 167, Exx. 24–25):

It is also important to note that the individual denoted by the antecedent of a perspectival anaphor doesn’t need to actually hold a (mental or spatial) perspective with respect to the predication containing the anaphor. Rather, the predication containing this anaphor must be evaluated (or determined) relative to the perspective of this individual. To appreciate the distinction, observe that it is possible in English to bind an anaphor under a negated attitude verb, as in (10), below:¹

In (10), Susan has no realization, thus no perspective, on the fact that there’s a letter from herself. Yet, her perspective is still involved in evaluating the predication containing herself. Similar arguments can be made for anaphora that is regulated by spatial perspective (for discussion, see Levinson 2003; Kracht 2008; Barlew 2016).

Given these considerations and the rest of the discussion above, I define perspectival anaphora as in (11) below:

2.2 Structural vs. pragmatic approaches to perspectival anaphora

There is a fundamental analytic tension in the literature between conceptual and structural approaches to perspectival anaphora. The perhaps more traditional conceptual view is motivated by considerations like: (i) a tacit assumption that discourse-pragmatic notions like “perspective” do not belong in the domain of syntax proper but are, in some sense, peripheral to it; and (ii) the observation that perspectival anaphora seems to violate cornerstones of structural wellformedness (in generative frameworks like GB and Minimalism), making a syntactic analysis seem in turn rather far-fetched. To elaborate on the latter, in sentences like Icelandic (5), the antecedent is not local to the anaphor; since syntactic relationships are held to be fed by locality, such structures pose a non-trivial challenge. In multiply embedded sentences, the anaphor may be anteceded by a nominal across another one that is closer to it, in apparent blatant violation of Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 1990), another structural wellformedness condition. In such sentences, there is often also more than one individual that satisfies the perspectival conditions laid out in (11), thus more than one potential antecedent; the choice of antecedent in such cases is thus also indeterminate, which violates the idea that syntactic derivations yield a deterministic output. In so called “backward binding” constructions (Minkoff 2003), which occur in psych predications, the antecedent, which takes on the role of experiencer in the psych predication, doesn’t even c-command the anaphor on the surface — as shown for Italian (12) (Giorgi 2006) and English (13) (Minkoff 2003):

Finally, the problem with logophoric relationships like that in English (4) above is, if anything, even more challenging. Here, the antecedent of the perspectival anaphor is extra-sentential which poses a non-trivial challenge to a model of syntax that can only deal with sentence-bounded dependencies.

The obvious solution, given these challenges, would seem to be to derive perspectival anaphora through purely non-structural, discourse-pragmatic means. The problem is that the role of structure cannot be dismissed entirely: its relevance already makes itself known in one interesting way. There is a robust and systematic antilocality effect observed with most perspectival anaphors crosslinguistically. That is, long-distance anaphors (so called “se” anaphors in the Reinhart & Reuland 1993 parlance), many of which show perspectival properties of the kind discussed here, resist being bound reflexively (i.e. by a co-argument of the verb). Given that locality is a structural concept, the sensitivity to locality entails sensitivity to structure, by transitivity.²

Motivated in part by such observations,³ the structural view within the generative framework (e.g. the movement approach in Chomsky 1986a; Pica 1987; Huang & Tang 1991 and the Relativized Subject hypothess in Progovac 1993) argues that the involvement of perspective in anaphora is syntactically implemented. The other kind of argumentation for a structural treatment is a weaker one — namely that, in many cases, perspectival anaphora cannot be understood discourse-pragmatically. Koopman & Sportiche (1989) argue that perspectival anaphora in the Kwa language of Abe must be syntactically implemented because the types of verbs that select logophoric complements cannot be straightforwardly distinguished in terms of their lexical meaning. Rather, they all have the property that they select a clause with a particular kind of overt complementizer. Sells (1987) and Baker (2008) conclude the same, based on similar types of data from languages like Tuburi and Slave, respectively. Of course, underlying this type of reasoning is again the premise that discourse-pragmatic sensitivity and structural sensitivity are mutually incompatible.

In contrast to these theories, I will propose to make sense of this dual nature of perspectival anaphora by developing a model that exploits both structural and discourse-pragmatic aspects of grammar, interacting in a sequential derivation. In particular, I will argue that every instance of perspectival anaphora involves two types of dependency: a structural (i.e. syntactic and LF-semantic) one involving anaphoric binding by a perspectival null pronoun (pro) and a discourse-pragmatic one, building on this, involving coreference between the anaphor’s antecedent and pro (see Nishigauchi 2014; Charnavel 2017 for similar proposals).

3.1 Anaphora in Tamil is perspectival

Here, I focus on the properties of the Tamil anaphor taan, a morphologically simplex form whose basic case and number paradigms are given in Table 1.⁴ Ta(a)n can only take 3rd-person antecedents (gender irrelevant),⁵ as shown in (14).⁶

The anaphor ta(a)n in Tamil co-exists with other pro-forms (I classify these as pronouns) which differ from it in being able to refer deictically. Consider (15) below:

The obligatorily non-deictic nature of ta(a)n can be illustrated by comparing its behavior across the minimally contrasting discourse-scenarios below:⁷

Native speakers judge (15) ungrammatical in the scenario in (16) where there is both pointing and the spatial relations are reversed with respect to Raman’s spatial coordinates (the snake is to Raman’s right, not to his left). But (17) is judged perfectly acceptable under the discourse scenario in (1), where there is no pointing and the leftness of the snake is evaluated relative to Raman.⁸ A systematic difference arises when one contrasts (15) with a minimally varying sentence containing a deictic pronoun instead of the anaphor, as in (18):

In (15), the “left-ness” of the snake is evaluated from Raman’s spatial perspective; in (18), however, this leftness is evaluated from the spatial perspective of the (utterance-context) speaker or is underspecified (with respect to the perspective of the speaker vs. Raman). But the anaphor ta(a)n may only be licitly used in (15), where the spatial perspective-holder is the individual denoted by the antecedent and the antecedent alone. These examples show that perspective-holding plays a central role in regulating anaphoric dependencies in such languages.

The perspective-sensitivity of anaphora along the mental dimension, e.g. in attitude contexts, in Tamil, can be illustrated by its interaction with other perspective-sensitive elements, like epithets. An epithet occurring in the scope of an attitude holder cannot denote that attitude-holder (Dubinsky & Hamilton 1998 a.o.): it is thus anti-attitudinal. Thus, if mental perspective-holding regulates anaphora in Tamil, an anaphor in the scope of an attitude verb should not only be able to denote the attitude-holder, it should also be unable to corefer with an epithet in the scope of that attitude verb (see Charnavel 2017 for parallel tests in French). The sentence in (21) is unacceptable under the discourse scenario in (19), where it is understood that the epithet andæ muʈʈaaɭ (‘that idiot’) denotes the attitude-holder Sri. But it is acceptable under the discourse scenario in (20), where andæ muʈʈaaɭ (‘that idiot’) doesn’t denote the attitude-holder Sri, but his son. This shows that the epithet is anti-attitudinal:

Now, consider a sentence like (22) which contains both an anaphor and an epithet in the scope of an attitude verb (used in a free indirect discourse scenario). The logophoric ta(a)n must denote the attitude-holder (Sri) and is also obligatorily disjoint from andæ muʈʈaaɭ (‘that idiot’). As such, it is licit with the discourse scenario in (20) but incompatible with that in (19).

Perspectival anaphora in Tamil obtains “long-distance” (across multiple clauses — modulo processing, the actual distance doesn’t matter), logophorically, and in psych predications (yielding backward-binding structures involving a non-c-commanding experiencer antecedent). In all these structures, it can be shown with respect to diagnostics like those above that anaphora is perspectivally regulated along the mental or spatial dimensions. Additional supporting evidence comes from the fact that there is an animacy constraint on anaphoric antecedence: this follows naturally if antecedence is perspectivally regulated (see also Sundaresan & Pearson 2014 for further discussion and formalizations of this constraint for perspectival anaphora). I will thus take it to be uncontroversial that anaphora in Tamil is perspectival in the sense defined in (11) above.

Perspectival anaphora in Tamil is also subject to the awareness condition described for Japanese above. Thus, (24), analogous to Japanese (8), is licit under the discourse scenario in (23). However, (26) is illicit under this discourse scenario. However, the sentence becomes felicitous again, when ta(a)n is replaced with a coreferent (honorific) pronoun, as in the minimally varying sentence in (25):⁹

Finally, ta(a)n may be licitly bound under a negated attitude verb. Thus, (28) may be felicitously uttered by the reporting journalist in the discourse scenario in (27):¹⁰

The discussion here shows that anaphora in ta(a)n is perspective-sensitive, that it is regulated by sensitivity to spatial as well as mental perspective and, more specifically, that the role of perspective in anaphora in this language is as defined in (11).

3.2 Dual syntactico-pragmatic behavior

It was noted in Section 2.2 that perspectival anaphora crosslinguistically is characterized by a hybrid mixture of structural and discourse-pragmatic properties. Here, I present evidence to show that perspectival anaphora in Tamil exhibits the same behavior in this respect, as well.

Below, I show that long-distance anaphors in Tamil violate locality and, frequently, minimality and antecedence determinacy. In (29b), Krishnan antecedes ta(a)n across several other DPs that are structurally closer to the anaphor, at least one of which (namely Raman) also readily qualifies as a potential antecedent to it. Being two clauses higher, Krishnan is also clearly non-local to the clause containing ta(a)n. Thus, (29b) attests to apparent violations of non-locality and non-minimality and also to antecedence optionality. The latter is more clearly illustrated in (30c): here, either Krishnan or Raman may antecede ta(a)n as the referential indices indicate. Backward binding structures involving psych predications show us apparent violations of c-command: in (31b), Raman can antecede ta(a)n despite being embedded as a possessor DP inside the experiencer – thus clearly not c-commanding the anaphor. Finally, logophoric dependencies such as that illustrated in (33) show that the antecedent doesn’t need to be in the same sentence as the anaphor – but can be elsewhere in the salient discourse:

The larger take-home message from these empirical patterns is the same as before: such structures pose a genuine challenge to analyses that seek to derive these anaphora through purely structural means. But here again, as before, the role of structure cannot be dismissed out of hand. As has been noted elsewhere (see e.g. Schiffman 2006; Annamalai 2000), Tamil ta(a)n cannot be locally bound as is, without something extra, specifically a verbal suffix kol on ta(a)n’s clausemate verb, which is often classified as a kind of middle marker (see Sundaresan 2016), being added:¹¹

A similar situation seems to hold in the related Dravidian language Kannada, as discussed in detail in Lidz (2001; 2004: et seq). I discuss perspectival reflexives at the end of this paper in detail and try to derive the antilocality in terms of the model of perspectival anaphora developed here. At this point, it suffices to note that the mere existence of this pattern suggests that a structural restriction (some form of antilocality) is at work.

To sum up, then, we are left with the same mixed bag of properties in the case of perspectival anaphors in Tamil, as we were with the others: i.e. dependencies involving seemingly unruly syntactic behavior that nevertheless show sensitivity to structure (specifically to syntactic locality) and are simultaneously regulated by their sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic perspective.

4.1 Verbal agreement under ta(a)n in Tamil

In Tamil, verbal agreement for person, number, and gender (i.e. φ-agreement) is typically triggered by a local nominal in the nominative. Thus, in (35), the matrix verb reflects 3MSG agreement and is triggered by the nominative pronoun avan (‘he’) whereas the embedded verb, marked 2SG, matches the 2SG features of the embedded nominative subject nii (‘you’). In (36), the embedded subject has been changed to avaɭ (‘she’) and reflects 3FSG features on its clausemate verb:

But when the nominative nominal is the anaphor taan, the agreement on its clausemate verb varies in an interesting way. The sentence in (38) is licit only under the discourse scenario in (37a); (39) is licit only under the discourse scenario in (37b):

When the intended antecedent is avaɭ (‘she’) (as in (38)), the agreement under ta(a)n is 3FSG. (39) varies minimally from (38) with the only difference lying in the choice of antecedent for ta(a)n — the medial subject avan (‘he’) instead of the matrix subject avaɭ (‘she’). Here, the verbal agreement under the anaphor tracks this choice, with the agreement changing to 3MSG in (39). In (40), ta(a)n refers logophorically to the extra-sentential attitude-holder koɻændæ (‘child’) which triggers neuter agreement on its clausemate verb; although ta(a)n is in a different sentence, the agreement triggered under it must still reflect the φ-features of this antecedent: if koɻændæ were replaced by avan (‘he’), the agreement-marking in the following ta(a)n-sentence would be 3MSG -aan instead. The agreement patterns above thus suggest the following:

4.2 Agreement is not triggered by the antecedent

An obvious candidate for the source of agreement, given the antecedent-tracking effect of the agreement, given in (41), is the antecedent of the anaphor. Following e.g. Kratzer (2009) and others, we might propose that this is a case of φ-feature transmission from the antecedent to the embedded verb in the ta(a)n-clause (perhaps cyclically, via intermediate functional heads).

An immediate, potentially fatal problem for this view is that, in Tamil perspectival anaphora, the antecedent may be several clauses away, need not c-command the ta(a)n-clause and, in structures involving the logophoric use of ta(a)n, is extra-sentential (cf. (29b)–(30c)). Further evidence against such an account comes from seemingly mismatched agreement in sentences like (42):

(42) obtains under tightly constrained structural conditions, specifically only in the clausal complement of a speech predicate. The anaphor ta(a)n is its nominative subject and it takes an antecedent, the matrix subject Raman, which has 3MSG features, and triggers 3MSG agreement on the matrix verb. But the φ-agreement on the clausemate verb of ta(a)n is 1SG. A feature-transmission account cannot explain (much less derive) the mismatch between the features of the antecedent and those on the embedded verb.

(42) superficially seems to violate the antecedence-tracking generalization, described in (41). But a closer look at the interpretation of such examples shows that this is not the case:

What the contrast above shows is that the thematic properties and structural position of the antecedent directly affect the nature of agreement on the embedded verb. The antecedent must be the agent of a speech predicate and, furthermore, must be an argument of the clause that directly selects the ta(a)n clause as its complement.

Additional supporting evidence for this same point comes from number marking on the verb. When the agent of the selecting speech predicate (which also serves as the antecedent of the anaphor) is marked plural, the agreement on the verb under ta(a)n is 1PL not 1SG:

Sundaresan (2012) argues that sentences like (42), (44), and (46) involve indexical shift (von Stechow 2002; Schlenker 2003a; Anand 2006; Shklovsky & Sudo 2014) for 1st-person in the embedded clause: i.e. the 1st-person forms are evaluated against the speech index introduced by a selecting speech predicate, rather than against the utterance context. Such sentences show that the antecedent-tracking generalization in (41) does indeed hold: but the nature of agreement triggered in each case is different. In the standard (or elsewhere) case, antecedent-tracking yields φ-matching. In the more tightly constrained clausal complement of a speech verb (where indexical shift obtains), and where the antecedent denotes the agent of the speech verb, agreement is 1st-person.

4.3 Agreement is not triggered by the anaphor

Given that agreement is uniformly triggered by the nominative elsewhere in Tamil (see again (35)), a more reasonable claim might be that agreement under nominative ta(a)n is simply triggered by ta(a)n itself. Here, I argue against this conclusion on two grounds:

1. This would require us to claim that there is an anaphor and a 1st-person shifted indexical, both of which syncretize as ta(a)n — to deal with agreement contrasts like that between (38)–(40), (45), on the one hand, and (42), (44), and (46), on the other. While not impossible, this would be a difficult syncretism to capture formally because these categories do not seem to form a natural class.

2. 1st-person agreement can also be triggered under a 2nd-person indexical nii in Tamil. It is not possible to extend a syncretism account to deal with this pattern because this would involve claiming that nii is simultaneously an unshifted 2nd-person indexical and a shifted 1st-person indexical.

Turning to (i), we have just seen that the agreement on the clausemate verb under ta(a)n always tracks the antecedent of the anaphor (as described in (41)) but does so in different ways. In the clausal complement of a speech predicate, it matches the number of the antecedent but not its person; rather it shows up as 1st-person. In all other scenarios (the elsewhere case), it fully matches the φ-features of the antecedent. As mentioned, Sundaresan (2012) treats the 1st-person agreement cases as involving indexical shift in the complement of the speech predicate. Assuming this is correct, proposing that ta(a)n is the agreement trigger in such sentences would entail that ta(a)n is a shifted 1st-person indexical. Furthermore, recall that ta(a)n itself cannot take a 1st-person or 2nd-person antecedent (cf. (42)–(46)). This means that ta(a)n wouldn’t just be a 1st-person form that can be shifted: rather, it would have to be the spell-out of an obligatorily shifted 1st-person indexical. Of course, this wouldn’t yield the φ-matching agreement pattern in the elsewhere case. So here, we would have to propose that ta(a)n spells out a 3rd-person pro-form (with additional gender and number features). In other words, if ta(a)n is the controller of both patterns of verbal agreement, it should be able to bear either a 3rd-person feature (+ gender and number features) or an obligatorily shifted 1st-person feature. While we could set up post-syntactic spell-out rules that yield this kind of syncretism, it would be quite difficult to do so in a principled way, as 3rd-person and obligatorily shifted 1st-person do not seem to form a natural class (which could e.g. be defined in terms of a common set of features, with underspecification for all others).¹²

Moving now to (ii), even more compelling evidence that the shifted indexical triggering 1st-person agreement in sentences like (42)–(46) is not ta(a)n, comes from (47) below:

In (47), we have the 2nd-person indexical nominative pronoun nii (‘you’) in the clausal complement of a speech verb which is coreferent with the agent of this speech predicate. In (46)), we again have nii as the embedded subject, but the agreement triggered under nii in the embedded clause is 1SG. Such seemingly mismatched 1SG agreement only obtains under ta(a)n and under nii, under highly constrained structural conditions (namely, in the clausal complement of a speech predicate), as illustrated here; it doesn’t obtain under other nominative DPs (e.g. a 3rd-person pronoun like avan (‘he’) or avaɭ (‘she’)) in the same structural configuration:

Given the many parallels, the structure in (47) again looks like it involves indexical shift in the embedded clause: note that the 1st-person agreement does not denote the utterance-context speaker but, rather, the speaker of the intensional index associated with the matrix speech predicate (see Messick 2016 for parallel examples from related Dravidian language Telugu, which are also analyzed in terms of indexical shift). But claiming that the shifted 1st-person indexical is embedded nii in (47) is even harder to maintain than it was with ta(a)n, since nii has an explicitly 2nd-person form and denotes the Addressee of the utterance-context. I.e. it looks like a well-behaved unshifted 2nd-person indexical in Tamil. This means that, in sentences like (47), the embedded nii cannot be the source of 1SG agreement on its clausemate verb: rather, this suggests that there is some other element in the local domain, specifically a shifted 1st-person indexical, that triggers this agreement.

This should immediately make apparent that any syncretism account adopted to handle agreement under ta(a)n cannot be readily extended to handle agreement under nii. For instance, an analysis that postulated that ta(a)n syncretically spells out an obligatorily shifted 1st-person indexical and a 3rd-person anaphor, while nii spells out 2SG would fail to yield the 1st-person agreement under nii in (47). On the other hand, we could extend the analysis that we are led to posit for (47), namely that 1st-person agreement is triggered by some other shifted 1st-person indexical (presumably silent) in the embedded clause, to the ta(a)n sentences in ((42)–(46)) as well as those in (38)–(40) and (45). I.e. rather than having different flavors of ta(a)n triggering the agreement (3rd vs. 1st) (which is independently non-trivial, as discussed earlier), we could propose that some other nominal in the local domain, which is sometimes a shifted 1st-person indexical, does so. This would yield a unified analysis of verbal agreement in embedded clauses, including in sentences like (47).

5.1 A mediating pronoun

Recall that:

1. φ-agreement triggered under nominative ta(a)n always tracks the antecedent in different ways: in the clausal complement of a speech predicate, it is 1st-person, triggered by a shifted 1st-person pronoun, but still reflects the features of the agent of the speech predicate; everywhere else, it matches the φ-features of the antecedent.

2. antecedent-tracking agreement only obtains when the clausemate subject is ta(a)n or, in the clausal complement of speech verbs, nii. In all other instances, agreement reflects the features of its clausemate nominative argument.

The most straightforward way to derive the antecedent-tracking effect in (i) would be to have the pro that (putatively) triggers verbal agreement corefer with the antecedent of the anaphor. In the default scenario, the φ-feature sets of the two coreferring nominals are evaluated against the same context (default = utterance-context); thus, coreference entails φ-matching. This plays out as follows. In a sentence like (38), the pro corefers with the antecedent avaɭ (‘she’); since both pro and the antecedent are evaluated against the same evaluation context, coreference entails φ-matching, thus pro also has 3FSG features. Pro thus triggers 3FSG verbal agreement under nominative ta(a)n, and the agreement matches the φ-features of the antecedent, by transitivity. In a sentence like (42), we are assuming that the 1SG agreement on the embeded verb is triggered by a clausemate shifted 1st-person indexical. We are proposing that verbal agreement is triggered by pro, so this entails that the shifted 1st-person indexical is pro. But the φ-features of the antecedent — namely the agent of the selecting speech predicate — are evaluated against the unshifted utterance-context. I.e. in (42), pro is 1SG and denotes Raman in the shifted context, while Raman has 3MSG features in the unshifted one, and also denotes Raman: thus both nominals corefer. More generally, context-shifting allows us to get coreference between pro and the antecedent (and thus the antecedence-tracking effect with verbal agreement) without the added entailment of φ-matching between them.

The observation in (ii) above — i.e. the fact that the perspectival pronoun triggers verbal agreement only when the anaphor (as opposed to some other nominal, e.g. a coreferent pronoun) occurs in the nominative, shows that it must also be sensitive to the presence of the anaphor in some way. This in turn demonstrates that it is not enough to have the pro interact with the antecedent alone; it must interact with the anaphor, as well. I propose, specifically, that the perspectival pronoun Agrees with the anaphor in syntax and binds it at LF — a position I elaborate on more explicitly in Section 5.3. Since pro corefers with the antecedent, we get coreference between the anaphor and its antecedent by transitivity (see Nishigauchi 2014; Charnavel 2017 for similar proposals for exempt anaphora in French and Japanese, respectively). In other words:

5.2 Enter grammatical perspective

Where does perspective fit into all this? Recall that the central property of anaphora in Tamil is that it is perspectival, defined in the sense of (11), repeated below:

The most elegant way to combine the insights in (49) and (50) would be to propose that the silent pronoun that mediates between the anaphor and its antecedent is itself a perspectival pronoun.

Let us now try to be precise about what a perspectival pronoun is. Like any other pronoun, the perspectival pro will bear inherent φ-features: this is what allows it to trigger verbal agreement in sentences where ta(a)n occurs as the nominative subject. However, unlike standard pronouns, it bears an added restriction that the individual it denotes must be perspectival in the sense defined in (50). I propose that this restriction comes about purely as a function of where this pronoun is merged in the structure. Specifically, I argue that pro is introduced in the specifier of a perspectival head (Persp) which assigns it a perspective-holding “discourse role” with respect to the proposition in its complement, via Event Identification (this analysis takes much of its intuition from the structural implementation of point-of-view (POV) proposed in Speas 2004; see also Nishigauchi 2014; Charnavel 2017 for recent proposals along very similar lines). This is, incidentally, much like the Voice head assigning an Agent θ-role to the external argument in Kratzer (1996). The Persp head selects the perspectival predication in its complement and has the following denotation:

Following Heim & Kratzer (1998), I assume that φ-features on pronouns are encoded as presuppositions, formalized as partial functions on their lexical entries. Thus, pro, if it were to be born with 3FSG features would have the lexical entry given in (52) in Tamil:

Once the pro in [Spec, Persp] composes with Persp — its reference gets restricted both by the presuppositions imposed by its own φ-features and the θ-role-like discourse information on perspective-holding contributed by the Persp head. The set of possible referents for pro is thus twice filtered — yielding a set of individuals who satisfy the φ-features on pro as well as the perspectival condition given in (50).

We observed at the outset that anaphoric perspective could be defined along the mental or spatial dimensions. Anaphora in Tamil can be regulated by either. Building on prior work concerning the semantics of self-ascription (Lewis 1979 a.o.), Sundaresan & Pearson (2014) propose that all perspectival predicates quantify over elements of a set that are designated by a sentient entity (the judge or perspective center) as candidates for her actual time, location or world. The difference between spatial vs. mental perspective-holding lies merely in the choice (location vs. world, respectively) of this coordinate. Building on this analysis, I further tentatively propose that the choice of these coordinates is made in the Persp head. To be concrete, the Persp head inside the complement of a spatial predicate (e.g. inside a locative PP or DP) will contain only the spatial coordinate, yielding spatial alternatives; the Persp head in the complement of an attitude verb will contain the World coordinate (yielding Doxastic alternatives) and so on (see also work on discourse centers in Roberts 2014 for related ideas).

5.3 A two-stage model of anaphora

The state of affairs described in (49) sets the stage for a two stage model of anaphora, with a mediating perspectival pro at its heart. The dependency between pro and the anaphor is distinguished by its being local and structurally constrained while that holding between pro and the antecedent of the anaphor is a case of (non-structural) discourse-pragmatic pronominal reference. Below, I describe the nature of this two-stage model of anaphora in detail.

6.1 “On the outside”: Pronominal

Under the two-stage model, the relationship between pro in [Spec, PerspP] and the individual denoted by the anaphor’s antecedent is just one of discourse-pronominal reference (restricted by a perspectival presupposition introduced by the Persp head). The antecedent of the anaphor and pro corefer as a result; similarly, the anaphor and pro corefer (since pro binds it). This predicts that the relationship between the antecedent and the anaphor shouldn’t fulfill any of the standard tests associated with standard bound-variable anaphora since the anaphor, in fact, has no direct relationship with the antecedent. Rather, it should display the characteristics of pronominal coreference.

Here, I show that this prediction is fulfilled. Bound-variable anaphors have been observed to be incapable of taking split antecedents. They must also obligatorily yield obligatory bound-variable readings when c-commanded by definite DPs such as R-expressions (Reinhart 1983). In contrast, regular pronouns may take split antecedents and may yield bound-variable as well as “strict” (due to their ability to refer discourse-pragmatically) readings under definite DPs. Such tests are thus commonly used to distinguish between pronominal and anaphoric uses of a term, when this is difficult to diagnose on the surface. Below, I show that the antecedence-ta(a)n relationship displays the characteristics of pronominal reference with respect to these diagnostics, rather than those of bound-variable anaphora (see Charnavel 2017 for similar evidence from exempt anaphora in French).

In Tamil, sentences involving ta(a)n can take split antecedents (see also Annamalai 2000) and can also yield bound-variable or strict readings:²³

Turning now to the bound-variable vs. strict reading contrast, see below:

(68) involves an obligatory control dependency that has only a bound-variable reading, as shown. On the other hand, both bound-variable and strict readings are available with regular pronominal reference, as in (69). When we apply this diagnostic to Tamil, we see that both bound-variable and strict readings are available, in a sentence like (72):

These are not isolated patterns: similar facts as in (72) have been reported for Japanese (Nishigauchi 2014) and French (Charnavel 2017). For instance, Nishigauchi shows that Japanese zibun can likewise yield non-bound-variable readings, as in (73) below (Nishigauchi 2014: 172, Ex. 45, formatting mine):

As discussed earlier, the facts in (67) and (72) are precisely what we predict if the relationship between the antecedent and ta(a)n is not anaphoric, but pronominal, because the actual relationship is one holding between the antecedent and pro; ta(a)n’s anaphoric needs are handled independent of the antecedent.

6.2 “On the inside”: Anaphoric

Strictly speaking, the patterns given above are perfectly consistent with the notion that there is no mediating pro. They could also be explained under the assumption that the perspectival pronoun is ta(a)n itself. Under such a model, ta(a)n, being a free pronoun, would have inherent φ-features and no unvalued DEP (or other unvalued) feature, since it wouldn’t enter into an Agree relation that feeds binding in syntax-semantics. It would thus also be able to trigger agreement on the verb when it occurs in the nominative. The only hiccup in the analysis would be the independent difficulties with a syncretism analysis that would go hand in hand with having ta(a)n be the source of agreement, as discussed in Section 4.3. Nevertheless, the fact that we get strict and sloppy reference under ellipsis, and that ta(a)n can take split antecedents would both be predicted.

Here, I present empirical arguments against this alternative. To this end, I show that, despite the pronominal nature of the relationship between ta(a)n and its antecedent, the pronoun is not ta(a)n itself. Rather, ta(a)n is a locally bound anaphor (a bound variable), which is bound by a pro in its local PerspP, just as argued in this proposal. There are two kinds of evidence I present to this end:

1. Multiple occurrences of ta(a)n within a single PerspP cannot take distinct antecedents: they are forced to take the same antecedent.

2. The notion that ta(a)n is bound by a pro in [Spec, PerspP] coupled with the idea that the structural position where pro is merged is higher than [Spec, TP], the syntactic position of the clausal subject — predicts that object ta(a)n should not be capable of being locally anteceded by its clausemate subject. I.e. it predicts that surface reflexivity should be banned with ta(a)n.

In the sections below, I show that both predictions are met.

6.3 Summing up

In this section, I have presented independent evidence to support the proposal that perspectival anaphora involves a two-stage process with a mediating pro at its core: a structural one involving a variable-binding relation between the anaphor and a perspectival pro in its local domain and a discourse pragmatic one involving regular pronominal (co)-reference between pro and the antecedent of the anaphor.

Although the initial motivation for this proposal was evidence involving verbal agreement triggered under anaphora in Tamil, I have argued in this section that this model makes the right empirical predictions with respect to perspectival anaphora in Tamil and languages like it. In particular, it predicts that the relationship between the antecedent and pro should display the empirical fingerprint of (discourse-)pronominal reference while that between pro and the anaphor should display that of bound-variable anaphora. I have attempted to show at length that these predictions are fulfilled. With respect to the former, ta(a)n can take split antecedents and yield strict readings in the domain of definite DPs. With respect to the latter, I show that multiple occurrences of ta(a)n within a single PerspP (binding domain) cannot take distinct antecedents: this follows from the independently supported notion that each PerspP has exactly one pro binder. I also argued that the two-stage model predicts that standard reflexivity should be ruled out within a perspectival system, as a function of antilocality (violations of Conditions B or C). This prediction is also borne out.