Principle C

A widely made observation is that there is something that disfavors repeating names, and name-like terms, when they are intended to corefer. This paper investigates the sentence internal version of this penalty. I begin by relating it to a more general condition in Tom Wasow’s MIT dissertation that disallows an anaphor from having more information in it than that anaphor’s antecedent. I attempt to sketch how that condition can be viewed as a consequence of how the presuppositions of definite descriptions are accommodated. I then argue that Principle C is a related version of this process, but one that holds of function application rather than anaphora strictly speaking. This is an idea of Ed Keenan’s, which I modify so that it is related to the repeated name condition.