A phase theoretic account of coreference relations in picture DPs

Abstract

An experimental study of native speaker judgments by Keller & Asudeh (2001) demonstrated that in picture DPs, pronouns and anaphors are in complementary distribution in some cases (e.g., "Hannah_i found a picture of ?*her_i/herself_i"), but not in others (e.g., "Hannah_i found Peter's picture of her_i/herself_i"). We demonstrate that these facts result from two factors: 1) whether or not a pronominal and antecedent originate in a strong phase, 2) the availability of a process whereby an element with an uninterpretable feature can be reinserted into a subnumeration as a Last Resort, in order to avoid being sent to Spell-Out.