Binding and co-reference

This chapter provides a review of prior studies investigating non-native speakers’ pronoun resolution. The focus is on whether they have difficulty in rejecting pronouns with local c-commanding antecedents, which is a well-known finding reported in the field of first language acquisition. Previous second language (L2) studies have reported contradictory findings about how L2 learners react to pronouns with clause-internal antecedents (which lead to ungrammaticality for native English speakers). This chapter suggests that such findings can be explained from the perspective of the modular approach to anaphor resolution (Reinhart, 1983; Reuland, 2001, 2011) and the perspective of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2006, 2011; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006).