Overcoming Empirical Challenges for an Extended Approach to Condition C

Various empirical phenomena have been regarded as problematic for accounts of Condition C, including the behavior of epithets, focus constructions, and sentences where a bound R-expression can be used for the purpose of disambiguation. I argue that these problematic data can be accounted for within the competition-based framework proposed by Safir (2004), with slight modifications, including the adoption of an explicit focus semantics and of Dubinsky and Hamilton’s (1998) analysis of epithets as antilogophoric pronouns. In particular, I argue that several phenomena claimed to be pragmatic by Schlenker (2005) can be accounted for syntactically.