A Very Long-Distance Anaphor?

Abstract Yag Dii (Niger-Congo/Adamawa-Ubangi, Cameroon; also called Duru) has a complicated pronominal system, originally described by Bohnhoff (1986), with four series of pronouns whose distribution is determined by their grammatical function and the type of clause in which they appear. One series seems to exhibit an otherwise unattested form of non-locality: at least one clause must intervene between the pronoun and its antecedent, and the presence or absence of coreferent phrases in the intervening clause does not affect its appearance or distribution. The nature of the relation between this very long-distance pronoun and its antecedent seems to violate otherwise well-established notions of locality of anaphoric relations and, indeed, of grammatical dependencies more generally. We present an analysis of the binding requirements of this anaphor that relies on features associated with different parts of its binding domain, and compare our analysis to alternatives which involve the specification of extended paths.