Agreeing to bind: the case of Russian

Abstract

This contribution offers an analysis of the structural constraints on the interpretation of the Russian anaphoric expressions sebja and svoj. It accounts for a number of intricate binding patterns, such as the ‘animacy effect’ in the case of non-local binding and apparent irregularities in subject orientation and complementarity in local and long-distance binding. We show that these patterns can be accounted for in a unified manner by Multiple Agree-based dependencies established separately for person and number features, assuming the presence of a ϕ-incomplete number-only probe low in the structure. As a result of the valuation procedure the reflexives end up only partially valued and thus remain distinct from pronominals.