Beate Hampe and Christian Lehmann1 Partial coreference 1 Introduction Let us assume a two-place predicate, such as ‘exploit’, both of whose arguments may be human. Let us further pursue the question of what constellations of participants are possible in its two argument positions – or, syntactically speaking, what kinds of subjects can be combined with what kinds of direct objects. Selection restrictions or the entire extension of the empathy hierarchy do not matter here, because that parameter is already set to the value ‘human’. The most relevant subdivisions inside this subcategory are provided by person and number. The question is thus which person and number values of the subject can be combined with which person and number values of the direct object and, analogously, of other syntactic functions of two- and three-place predicates. Before we elaborate on the theoretical side of the issue, let us consider Table 1, which provides an illustrative English example in order to clarify the nature and rel- evance of the issue. Concerning the forms in the second person, we have made visible the number differences for demonstrative purposes by using Early Modern English. As can be read off from the light grey cells of Table 1, subject-object combina- tions with identical first or second person and identical number automatically yield coreference between these arguments, which generally makes the use of a reflexive construction obligatory. 2 We have stipulated coreference for the third person, too, so as to complete the picture. However, the light grey cells will not occupy us any further. The white cells of Table 1 display cases with disjoint pronominal references and are thus of no concern to this study either. 1 The names of the authors appear in alphabetical order. We thank Balthasar Bickel, Volker Gast, Martin Haspelmath and Ekkehard König for helpful discussion of the typological data presented at the Leipzig Workshop in memory of Anna Siewierska. 2 Quirk et al. (1985: 375, 6.2.4, note [c]) remark that the use of personal pronouns in this context is occasionally found, esp. in colloquial American English.