The day after: temporal anaphoric locutions

In this paper we discuss some of the properties of anaphoric temporal locutions such as il giorno prima (the day before) in Italian, focusing on their behaviour in clauses embedded under verbs of propositional attitude. It will be a major concerns of ours to explain why in DAR-enforcing contexts, the hidden variable of embedded anaphoric phrases cannot pick up the same referent as the matrix event, whereas they can do so in non-DAR contexts. It will be argued that the explanation calls for a sharpening of intuitions and ideas about the nature of the DAR, and of sequence of tense phenomena in general, according to which: a) the matrix event is not available for direct, cross-clausal reference, but only through the mediation of updated assignment sequences, whereby it becomes the new temporal coordinate; b) double access sentences involve a double evaluation of the embedded clause: by means of the speaker-oriented sequence (the temporal anchor is the utterance), and by means of the subject-oriented one (the temporal anchor is updated to the attitude/saying episode). With this, the contrast stems from the impossibility for the hidden variable of temporal anaphoric expressions to have the same reference as the temporal coordinate of the speaker-oriented sequence, an independently motivated constraint