Breaking the Coreference Rule Reflexivity in Russian Sign Language * Pavel Rudnev Rijksuniversiteit Groningen Vadim Kimmelman Universiteit van Amsterdam 2nd August 2011 Abstract This paper is concerned with the distribution of reflexive and non-reflexive pro- nouns in local anaphoric configurations in (three dialects of) Russian Sign Language (RSL). We demonstrate that most of the observed facts can be accounted for on a Binding Theory supplemented by a version of the Coreference Rule (Büring, 2005). We also show that an additional mechanism, coreference via the signing space, is required to explain certain cases of non-complementarity. A related mechanism is proposed to account for similar facts in spoken languages. 1 Introduction Reflexive and non-reflexive pronouns usually appear in complementary distribution, with reflexives in local, especially coargument, anaphoric configurations interpreted as bound variables. This principle, going back to Reinhart (1983), is known as the Coreference Rule (Büring, 2005) and is one of the main achievements of the Binding Theory in general. It is this rule in combination with Principle B of the Binding Theory that accounts for the pattern in (1). (1) a. John i saw himself i . (himself is an anaphor and is bound) b. John i saw him *i/j . (him is a pronominal and cannot be bound) Russian Sign Language (henceforth RSL) seems to break this pattern of complementarity by allowing non-reflexive pronouns to be used in co-argument reflexive contexts. * This project goes back to the Formal Semantics and Anaphora course taught by Barbara Partee in 2008 in Moscow. We would like to thank her for her discussions and criticisms, and all other participants of said course. We also would like to thank R. Pfau, P. Schlenker and H. Zeevat for their comments on binding in RSL. We also wish to express our gratitude to the audiences at 6th Conference on Typo- logy and Grammar (St. Petersburg, November 2009), MSCL 5 (Moscow, April 2010), Peculiar Binding Configurations (Stuttgart, September 2010), 12th Szklarska Poreba Workshop (Szklarska Poreba, March 2011) and FEAST (Venice, June 2011) for valuable feedback, and naturally our informants without whose judgements this project would not have been possible. 1