Binding (linguistics)

In linguistics, binding is the phenomenon in which anaphoric elements such as pronouns are grammatically associated with their antecedents. For instance in the English sentence "Mary saw herself", the anaphor "herself" is bound by its antecedent "Mary". Binding can be licensed or blocked in certain contexts or syntactic configurations, e.g. the pronoun "her" cannot be bound by "Mary" in the English sentence "Mary saw her". While all languages have binding, restrictions on it vary even among closely related languages. Binding has been a major area of research in syntax and semantics since the 1970s, and was a major for the government and binding theory paradigm. The following sentences illustrate some basic facts of binding. The words that bear the index i should be construed as referring to the same person or thing. a. Fredi is impressed with himselfi. – Indicated reading obligatory b. *Fredi is impressed with himi. – Indicated reading impossible a. *Susani asked Arthur to help herselfi. – Indicated reading impossible, sentence ungrammatical b. Susani asked Arthur to help heri. – Indicated reading easily possible a. Suei said shei was tired. – Indicated reading easily possible b. *Shei said Suei was tired. – Indicated reading impossible a. Fred'si friends venerate himi. – Indicated reading easily possible b. ?Hisi friends venerate Fredi. – Indicated reading unlikely These sentences illustrate some aspects of the distribution of reflexive and personal pronouns. In the first pair of sentences, the reflexive pronoun must appear for the indicated reading to be possible. In the second pair, the personal pronoun must appear for the indicated reading to be possible. The third pair shows that at times a personal pronoun must follow its antecedent, and the fourth pair further illustrates the same point, although the acceptability judgement is not as robust. Based on such data, one sees that reflexive and personal pronouns differ in their distribution and that linear order (of a pronoun in relation to its antecedent or postcedent) is a factor influencing where at least some pronouns can appear.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (5)

Related concepts (10)

Related lectures (2)

Reciprocal pronoun

A reciprocal pronoun is a pronoun that indicates a reciprocal relationship. A reciprocal pronoun can be used for one of the participants of a reciprocal construction, i.e. a clause in which two participants are in a mutual relationship. The reciprocal pronouns of English are one another and each other, and they form the category of anaphors along with reflexive pronouns (myself, yourselves, themselves, etc.). Reflexive pronouns are used similarly to reciprocal pronouns in the sense that they typically refer back to the subject of the sentence.

Anaphora (linguistics)

In linguistics, anaphora (əˈnæfərə) is the use of an expression whose interpretation depends upon another expression in context (its antecedent or postcedent). In a narrower sense, anaphora is the use of an expression that depends specifically upon an antecedent expression and thus is contrasted with cataphora, which is the use of an expression that depends upon a postcedent expression. The anaphoric (referring) term is called an anaphor. For example, in the sentence Sally arrived, but nobody saw her, the pronoun her is an anaphor, referring back to the antecedent Sally.

Non-configurational language

In generative grammar, non-configurational languages are languages characterized by a flat phrase structure, which allows syntactically discontinuous expressions, and a relatively free word order. The concept of non-configurationality was developed by grammarians working within Noam Chomsky's generative framework. Some of these linguists observed that the Syntactic Universals proposed by Chomsky and which required a rigid phrase structure was challenged by the syntax of some of the world's languages that had a much less rigid syntax than that of the languages on which Chomsky had based his studies.

Transfer Learning from Pre-trained BERT for Pronoun Resolution

Qianqian Qiao, Xingce Bao

The paper describes the submission of the team "We used bert!" to the shared task Gendered Pronoun Resolution (Pair pronouns to their correct entities). Our final submission model based on the fine-tuned BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Tra ...

ASSOC COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS-ACL2019

Pronoun Translation and Prediction with or without Coreference Links

Andrei Popescu-Belis, Lesly Sadiht Miculicich Werlen

The Idiap NLP Group has participated in both DiscoMT 2015 sub-tasks: pronoun-focused translation and pronoun prediction. The system for the first sub-task combines two knowledge sources: gram matical constraints from the hypothesized coreference links, and ...

2015

A diagnostic procedure for applying the social-ecological systems framework in diverse cases

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer

The framework for analyzing sustainability of social-ecological systems (SES) framework of Elinor Ostrom is a multitier collection of concepts and variables that have proven to be relevant for understanding outcomes in diverse SES. The first tier of this f ...

Resilience Alliance2015

Coreference Resolution EE-608: Deep Learning For Natural Language Processing

Delves into coreference resolution, discussing challenges, advancements, and evaluation methods.

Coreference Resolution

Covers coreference resolution, models, applications, challenges, and advancements in natural language processing.