Perspectival Anaphora

Abstract A perspectival anaphor reflects the mental or spatial perspective of its antecedent and is often categorized as a ‘long-distance anaphor’ or ‘logophor’. This chapter presents an overview of perspectival anaphora in Dravidian, using the Tamil anaphor ta(a)n as a case study. Perspectival anaphora has been claimed in the literature to be a structurally recalcitrant phenomenon since the antecedent of a perspectival anaphor is typically non-local to it and need not c-command it. However, we will see evidence from Tamil ta(a)n in this chapter showing that this is just an illusion: anti-locality effects and evidence from verbal agreement and dialectal microvariation show that ta(a)n must be bound locally by a minimally c-commanding binder, in accordance with Binding Condition A. Based on these findings, I propose a two-stage model of perspectival anaphora, which systematically combines pronominal coreference within the discourse context with anaphoric binding in syntax and semantics.