The Anaphor Agreement Effect as epiphenomenon

Contemporary approaches to anaphora and agreement observe the existence of a restriction prohibiting full resolved agreement with reflexive anaphors that presents a crosslinguistically stable pattern known as the Anaphor Agreement Effect (the AAE, Rizzi 1990). In contrast to most of the existing work that has attempted to provide a unified account of the ban on agreement with reflexive anaphors known as the Anaphor Agreement Effect, the present contribution defends the view whereby the AAE is a by-product of agreement-related patterns independently attested in the languages surveyed. I argue that the AAE is heterogeneous and arises from independent factors specific to a particular language or language family (the internal composition of reflexive anaphors as possessed body parts, or the defective case paradigms for reflexive anaphors). There is no deep-rooted ban on agreement with reflexive anaphors, and there can therefore be no strategies that languages would ‘use’ to avoid violating it.

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