Two types of binding Evidence from Tswefap pronominals
Traditional accounts of semantic binding have relied on operators that bind individual variables (Heim, 1998; Heim and Kratzer, 1998) However, proposals motivated by e type anaphora and similar phenomena have analyzed pronominals as containing situation variables which are instead bound by a class of sigma operators (Buring, 2004; Elbourne, 2001, 2005, 2013) In this paper, I will argue that situation binding is indeed necessary to account for certain binding phenomena crosslinguistically, but that binding of individual variables plays a crucial role as well. That is, binding of situation variables complements, but does not fully replace, binding of individual variables (Schwarz, 2009; Patel Grosz and Grosz, 2017) In support of this claim, I present novel data from Tswefap, a Narrow Grassfields Bantoid language of Cameroon. There are two third person singular subject pronouns in Tswefap, zheuk and yi, which differ in their distribution. Among other things, yi can act as a bound variable under the scope of a quantifier, while zheuk cannot, and zheuk can locally bind a reflexive, while yi cannot. Following recent work that attributes crosslinguistic variation in pronoun distribution to internal structural differences (Dechaine and Wiltschko, 2002; Patel Grosz and Grosz, 2017) I argue that these distributional differences result from different internal structures in a way that draws on two distinct binding mechanisms. Specifically, following Patel Grosz and Grosz's (2017) account of German personal and demonstrative pronouns, I propose that zheuk contains an individual variable (an index) and a situation variable, while yi contains only a situation variable. The presence of both types of variables within the structure of zheuk allows it to participate in both situation and individual binding. On the other hand, yi can participate only in situation binding. I also argue that the licensing of b operators needed to bind individual variables (Buring, 2004) is restricted in Tswefap to zheuk and definites, resulting in the unacceptability of yi with reflexives. These data thus suggest that both individual binding and situation binding are available crosslinguistically, and that the licensing of binding operators ranging over individuals (b) may be more restricted than has previously been claimed.