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What prevents pronominals from being locally bound? Does this a) reflect an intrinsic property of pronominals (Chomsky 1981), is it b) a relative (economy) effect, that only shows up where there is a more dedicated competitor (see from different perspectives, Safir 2004, Boeckx, Hornstein and Nunes 2007, Levinson 2000), does it c) have a semantic basis as in Schlenker (2005), or does it d) follow from general conditions on agree based chains, and reflexive predicates (Reuland 2011a)? To help resolve this issue, we investigate Khanty (Uralic, spoken in Northwest Siberia), a language that is reported to allow locally bound pronom- inals (Nikolaeva 1995), and assess whether it in fact does have them, and, which factors come into play when local binding obtains.

The aim of this dissertation is to provide a detailed analysis of anaphoric dependencies in Vietnamese, with right from the start, a focus on theoretical puzzles and phenomena that contribute to our understanding of this particular language and of language in general. To achieve this goal, I investigated the inventory of anaphoric expressions, the expression of reflexivity, the syntactic representation of non-local anaphoric dependencies and the restrictions these dependencies are subject to. Prima facie the binding patterns in Vietnamese look rather different from the patterns in well-known languages like English. In addition to pronominal elements and an anaphoric element mình, also proper names and common noun expressions such as kinship terms and status terms show pronominal characteristics. Honorificity features appear to play a much more significant role in the language. While mình can be non-locally bound, for coargument binding it requires the element tự, just like other pronoun-type elements, reflecting the cross-linguistic pattern that reflexivity must be licensed. In addition, mình can virtually always be interpreted as the speaker in the absence of an overt 1st person antecedent. Non-local binding of mình is subject to a blocking effect that at first sight may seem similar to the blocking effect in Mandarin Chinese but is rather different in detail. With all the similarities and differences the Vietnamese anaphoric system possesses in comparison to other languages, I show that it can be unified into the world of anaphors/reflexives and successfully accounted for by a Multiple-Agree based approach to anaphor binding as elaborated in this dissertation.