On Deriving Constraints on Bound Anaphora

Close examination of previous constraints on bound anaphora that are designed to directly constrain the distribution of referentially dependent(RD) items shows that no universal structural relation may exist that relates RD items to their antecedents. As an alternative to these constraints, this paper proposes an axiom of semantic interpretation, called the Principle of Referential Autonomy, which dispenses with any pretheoretical notion of grammatical functions or configurational notion like c-command. Together with certain English-specific facts, this principle enables us to infer the ungrammaticality of core examples of strong and weak crossover.