The features of binding and person licensing

This thesis is concerned with the features that underlie the syntax of reflexive binding and person licensing, addressing two competing analyses within Agree-based frameworks, namely φ-feature-based and referential-feature-based approaches. In order to determine what is the featural correlate of anaphoric dependencies, it focuses on a specific class of syntactic restrictions on reflexive anaphors and anaphoric agreement markers: in several languages, reflexives are banned as direct objects in double object constructions, patterning with 1st/2nd person pronouns and obeying what is known as the Person-Case Constraint (PCC). The aim of this thesis is to develop a syntactic theory of binding and person licensing that accounts for the common behavior of reflexives and 1st/2nd person pronouns in double object constructions and beyond, in a way that informs the debate on the featural content of anaphors and more largely on the syntactic encoding of reference and referential dependencies.2022-07-2