UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation investigates the grammar and processing of the Telugu anaphor tanu, which, unlike standard reflexives, resists binding by local co-arguments and instead prefers non-local, perspectival antecedents. I argue that tanu is a logophoric reflexive, licensed by a covert perspectival operator in the left periphery of its clause. Across self-paced reading and eye-tracking studies, I demonstrate that Telugu comprehenders initially retrieve the local, unlicensed co-argument before reanalyzing it to the licensed, non-local one. These findings support the local search hypothesis, which posits that anaphor resolution begins with the retrieval of the most local antecedents before more structurally distant ones. I suggest that this is part of a multi-stage resolution process (cf. Bonding and Binding; Sanford and Garrod, 1989), where an early heuristic link is formed to the nearest antecedent by local search, followed by a later stage of (potential) reanalysis and integration shaped by language-specific factors such as headedness and reflexive marking. Ultimately, this work highlights how universal processing routines interact with language-specific properties to shape the real-time interpretation of anaphors in Telugu.