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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.

This thesis is a study of syntactic constraints on the distribution and interpretation of the Russian reflexive pronouns sebja and svoj. These are usually, but, importantly, not always subject-oriented and in complementary distribution with pronominals, and in certain conditions they trigger some hitherto poorly studied interpretive effects. Russian also demonstrates considerable versatility in binding of NP-internal reflexives, including possessives. An explanatory account of the patterns in question, which canonical Binding Theory of Chomsky (1981) has been unable to provide, is offered. The proposed account assumes no features or principles specific to the reflexives. They are taken to realize bundles of derivationally valued interpretable phi-feature that enter into feature sharing dependencies with the antecedents, which encodes binding. In Chapter 2 constraints on the Agree operation are discussed and refined. It is concluded that they must apply to every feature and each direction of valuation independently. An unvalued feature instance can only receive its value from the closest matching relation, but itself can value multiple feature instances. Thus, Agree is supposed to be subject to relativized rather than absolute locality. Unlike in other Agree-based approaches to syntactic anaphora, in this thesis it is assumed that different phi-features (specifically person and number) can be shared separately, and either of them can support an anaphoric dependency. This is made possible by defective phi-feature probes, most importantly a number probe consistently positioned immediately above every complete argument structure. Anaphoric dependencies based on different phi-features have different interpretive properties: person sharing encodes awareness effects, while number sharing yields a distributive interpretation. This also has implications for the possibility of inanimate antecedents in various configurations. Possibly because the Russian reflexives can only be partially valued and thus cannot be spelled out as fully specified personal pronouns, they never realize derivationally acquired phi-feature values morphologically. It is well known that across languages long-distance reflexives tend to be more strictly subject-oriented than local ones. In Russian this holds even if locality is understood in the relative sense.Except PRO, only antecedents that trigger overt agreement can bind reflexives across closer non-nominative potential antecedents. The latter can only enter into number dependencies and don't prevent a person dependency across them, which explains this pattern. The complementary distribution of reflexives and pronominals as an effect of Agree holds for every alternating derivation separately, so if the derivations don't converge on the same antecedent, their superposition may result in apparent non-complementarity. This presents a challenge to global competition approaches to pronominal distribution. Where pronominals are not ruled out by the effects of the Agree operation in Russian, it becomes possible to detect that they can only be bound in configurations that are not too local. Among other issues considered in this thesis are certain differences in binding of dependents of process and result nominals, which correlate with their NP-internal movement possibilities, as well as binding into higher circumstantial PPs and comparative adverbs, which appear accessible only to number dependencies.

This dissertation describes and explains the distribution of Russian complement clauses with the complementizer čto. It is shown that complement clauses with čto display distributional restrictions that are not manifested by their English and Dutch counterparts and that do not follow from the standard account of complement clauses in the literature. Two classes of environments are discussed where such restrictions are observed, namely, complements of speech act verbs in their non-agentive uses and complements of nouns. In order to account for the observed restrictions, this dissertation argues that clausal complements in Russian project a DP-layer and thus are subject to the Case requirement, just like nominal complements. Consequently, clausal complements must appear in Case positions, in contrast to the standardly held view. It is proposed that in apparent “Caseless” positions clausal complements are licensed by a null preposition, which has licensing conditions related to its semantic interpretation (as a two-place relation between a proposition and its “utterer”/“holder”). As a result, the observed restrictions on clausal complements in Russian follow from the Case requirement of clausal complements coupled with the licensing conditions on the null preposition. This dissertation is of relevance to researchers working on the syntax and semantic of clausal complements, Case and the grammar of Slavic languages.

What makes a sentence hard to process? Apart from the meanings of the words it contains, their number, and the way these words combine into constituents, words also contribute to processing difficulty on the basis of their accessibility in lexical retrieval. Apart from their frequency of use or their complexity in form, the words’ accessibility is also influenced by the number and roles of related forms in the structure in which they are stored. This is a factor that so far has not been sufficiently taken into account. As is experimentally shown in this dissertation, a measure for this is the inflectional entropy of the paradigm, an information theoretic measure that quantifies the support that a word can receive from its inflectional paradigm during activation. This study investigates how the interplay between the available processing resources, as predicted by the inflectional entropy, and the linguistic constraints, modulates the speed of processing within and between-sentences, as well as within- and between-languages. I follow the ACT-R model of sentence comprehension, proposed by Lewis and Vasishth (2005), which states that processing delays in working memory result from interference during retrieval induced by the similarity between the target and the already processed items. Assuming that interference effects are present across the board, I focus on the stage of lexical activation (the stage before interpretation) and on verbs, in particular. The experimental results reported in this dissertation demonstrate that a verb's accessibility in long term memory, what I call the Activation Potential (AP), is proportional to the inflectional entropy of its paradigm, determining the speed, and thus the effort, with which it is processed, and also, crucially,modulating the processing of the rest of the sentence. In fact, the processing speed of a reflexive object, like the Dutch zichzelf, and unlike a definite NP like Maria, depends on the way the main verb was processed, providing evidence that the reflexive’s interpretation requires an operation on the verb. The processing speed of dependent elements in a sentence follows the “easy-to-activate-hard-to-re-access” principle and can either be boosted or delayed by the amount of available processing resources: reflexives will be processed more slowly as an object of a quickly processed verb than as an object of a hardly processed verb, unless the processing system abounds in resources and can boost the slow processing of the former. This principle holds within a sentence but is more apparent at a between-language level. More precisely, languages with rich inflection, like Greek, although they have longer words and more complicated paradigms, nevertheless benefit in terms of processing effort, at least during theinitial processing stages. This is because they have verbs with higher inflectional entropy which require fewer resources during first activation when compared to languages with poor inflection, like Dutch. Saving on resources at the first stages of sentence processing can boost computations that are costly but can also lead to excessive processing effort in subsequent steps. I take this to be a reflection of the necessary trade-off between space and information for the sake of successful real-time computations.