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Cole, Hermon, and Yanti (2015) present a number of far-reaching conclusions about language universals on the basis of their study of the anaphoric systems of the Austronesian languages of Indonesia. The present contribution critically assesses these conclusions. It reports a further set of data, and shows that contra to what these authors argue, the systems they discuss can be straightforwardly accounted for by a simple set of universal principles plus properties of the vocabulary of the languages involved. I conclude this article with some remarks on acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the psycholinguistic literature it has been proposed that readers and listeners often adopt a "good-enough" processing strategy in which a "shallow" representation of an utterance driven by (top-down) extra-grammatical processes has a processing advantage over a "deep" (bottom-up) grammatically-driven representation of that same utterance. In the current contribution we claim, both on theoretical and experimental grounds, that this proposal is overly simplistic. Most importantly, in the domain of anaphora there is now an accumulating body of evidence showing that the anaphoric dependencies between (reflexive) pronominals and their antecedents are subject to an economy hierarchy. In this economy hierarchy, deriving anaphoric dependencies by deep--grammatical--operations requires less processing costs than doing so by shallow--extra-grammatical--operations. In addition, in case of ambiguity when both a shallow and a deep derivation are available to the parser, the latter is actually preferred. This, we argue, contradicts the basic assumptions of the shallow--deep dichotomy and, hence, a rethinking of the good-enough processing framework is warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains the conditions on the binding of pronouns, simplex anaphors, and complex anaphors, distinguishing the roles of the computational system, interpretive procedures, and discourse storage. It argues for a general principle of economy counting interpretive steps. Locality conditions on binding are shown to follow from this economy principle and independent principles of (minimalist) syntax, providing the means to encode certain dependencies, most economically, within the computational system. It shows that the role of complex anaphors in licensing reflexivization follows from an interpretive condition holding at the conceptual-intentional (C-I) interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]