Reflexive pronouns with split antecedents

It has been firmly held for the past number of decades (and, we would argue, without proper justification) that anaphors cannot take split antecedents. This paper, which is a semantic investigation of the problem of split antecedency, endeavors to make the following points: (1) that the negative connection between anaphors and split antecedents is not necessarily an absolute truth which can be used as a syntactic norm; (2) that the answer to the apparent tendency lies in a very simple semantic constraint on the use of simple sentences in describing events; and (3) that the distinctive and mysterious behavior of picture noun reflexives, which show strong affinity for this type of referential dependency, can be accounted for straightforwardly by applying the semantic constraint of event description.