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<Paper uid="C90-3022">
  <Title>A Computational Approach to Binding Theory*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Introduction to Binding Theory
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Binding Theory (BT) is a module of the Government and Binding theory ruling the distribution and the referential properties of anaphors (such as himself), pronouns (such as him and his) and R(eferential)expressions (such as John, the man I met yesterday, my sister, etc). Here we will briefly illustrate its scope, without entering into a detailed analysis.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> It is a well known fact that lexical items, such as Noun Phrases, must undergo an interpretation process by which they are assigned a referent. Such a process is ruled by principles that vary according to the nature of the item in question, i.e. anaphor, pronoun or Rexpression. A first generalization can be stated as follows: anaphors must have an antecedent in the syntax, i.e. in the same sentence where they appear; pronouns can directly identify a referent in the world or in the previous discotu'se; R-expressions are intrinsically referential, i.e. they need no antecedent? Consider the following examples: (1)a. Johni loves himself i b. *I love himself In (1)a. the anaphor himself takes John as an antecedent, i.e. in technical terms, it is bound by it; irt (1)b, for morphological reasons, I cannot work as an antecedent for himself, so that the whole sentence is ruled out. 4 Consider now what happens in the case of pronouns: (2) John thinks that Mary likes him him can either refer to John or to someone else in the world, for instance to someone mentioned in the previous discourse. The conclusion up to this point can be summarized as follows: an anaphor must have an antecedent, a pronoun can have one, an R-expression cannot. However further properties must be taken into account; let us consider pronouns again: (3) Johni likes him,i ttim cannot be interpreted as John, contrary to what happens in (2): there is a &amp;quot;negative&amp;quot; condition on 3For reasons of space, the referential properties of quantified expressions and those of the so-called epithets are not considered here.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> 4R-expressions cannot be coindexed with any c-commanding item (see below for a definition of c-command). Consider the following example: (i) John likes John In this case, given that the first R-expression c-commands the second one, the two occurrences of John must refer to different persons.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> 120 l pronouns, since they cannot have an antecedent lying within a certain contexl:. Technically speaking, a pronoun must be free in its local domain; a similar locality condition holds with respect to anaphors, since ~tll anaphor must have an antecedent inside a certain domain: (.4)a. *John i thinks that Mary likes himselfi b. Mary thinks that John i likes himselfi (4)a. is ungrammatical because the intended antecedent, John, lies too far away.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The local domain is the so-called Complete Functional Complex (CFC) pertaining to the item in question, i.e. containing both the item itself and its governor: 5 (5) ?,is a Complete Functional Complex iff one of the lollowing holds: a) y is the (minimal) domain in which all the 0-roles pertaining to a lexical head m'e realized; b) y is the (minimal) domain in which all the grammatical functions pertaining to that head m'e realized.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Finally, an important structural condition must hold,  namely c-comm~md: (of. Chomsky, 1981; 1986): (6) cx c-commands fi iff 0'~\]3, a does not dominate \]3 and the first node, y, dominating cx also dominates \]3.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> &amp;quot;1-'o be bound by a given item actually means: to be coindexed and c-commanded by that item; whereas to be  free means: not to be coindexed with a c-cormnanding item (non c-commanding items might work, on the olher hand, as possible antecedents). The principles of b:iuding can be expressed as follows:  (7) A: An anaphor is bound in its local domain B: A pronoun is free in its local domain C: An R-expression is flee  Note that, as will be shown below, in our system we can also handle constructions involving the so-called pro-drop phenomena, found in languages like Italian, Spanish and so on. Consider the following Italian ex ample: 6 (8) proi arriva lui i lit: at:rives he The system must know that the coindexation in (8), i.e. the fact that the pronoun lui is coindexed with a c-commanding empty category (the expletive pro), is not a Principle B violation.</Paragraph>
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