Decomposing logophoric pronouns: a presuppositional account of logophoric dependencies

Logophoric pronouns in West African languages occur in attitude environments and are anaphorically linked to an attitude holder in a superordinate clause. This has motivated theorists to treat logophoric pronouns semantically as an obligatorily bound variable (bound from the edge of an embedded complement clause). Culy (Linguistics 32:1055-1094, 1994) and Bimpeh and Sode (in Proceedings of TripleA, vol. 6 pp. 1-16, 2021), however, point out that logophoric pronouns in Ewe do not behave like obligatorily bound variables, allowing both sloppy (bound) and strict (non-bound) readings in focus contexts involving 'only' and ellipsis. We strengthen this line of criticism by providing novel cross-linguistic data that indicate that logophoric pronouns in Ewe, Igbo and Yoruba support strict readings. We offer an alternative formal account to existing approaches that builds on Bimpeh et al. (in Proceedings of the 40th WCCFL, pp. 1-10, 2024) and can capture both strict and sloppy interpretations, while preserving the requirement that a logophoric pronoun be anaphoric to an attitude holder. The main novelty involves decomposition of logophoric pronouns into two syntactic components at LF-a variable that can in principle be free and refer strictly, and a semantic presuppositional feature log that can be ignored in ellipsis and focus sites, following similar ideas in the literature on pronominal features (Sauerland in Proceedings of SALT 23, pp. 156-173, 2013). Our analysis implies that in terms of their syntactic and semantic make up, logophors are essentially no different from other pronouns, consisting of a referential index plus semantic features.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11050-025-09242-x.