Towards a new account of reflexive binding possibilities in English and German

In this squib, we introduce a new derivational approach to anaphoric binding in West Germanic that addresses two issues plaguing other contemporary derivational accounts. First, by adopting upward (rather than downward) Agree coupled with Keine’s notion of Horizons (rather than phases), our treatment of anaphoric binding allows both a closer and a more distant goal to be simultaneously active and thus be possible binders (suppliers of $$\phi $$-features) for the anaphor, while adhering to different local computational domains depending on the language (i.e., selective opacity). Second, in line with Rooryck & Vanden Wyngaerd (R&VW)’s derivational approach, our treatment of anaphoric binding eliminates binding-specific primitives from Minimalist analysis, while also improving upon R&VW’s original proposal by avoiding gratuitous movement to phase edges.