Overview

The theory of Universal Grammar (UG) proposes a theory of universal principles that underlie all natural languages and, at the same time, a theory of the Initial State of the human organism, i.e. a Language Faculty in the human species which exists prior to experience, making language acquisition possible (Chomsky, 1981). One strength of this theory is that it formulates specific components of the Language Faculty which can be subjected to empirical testing. One component has been formulated in terms of “Binding Theory” (BT) (e.g. Chomsky, 1981), which concerns relations of anaphora between various forms of pronominal expressions and their antecedents (e.g. Lust 1986).

BT concerns a basic distinction in nominal and pronominal expressions in natural languages: they may either be “free” (or “referential”), they may refer to elements in the world freely (e.g. (1)), or be “bound” (e.g. (2a)), i.e. have their interpretation obligatorily determined by linguistic antecedents within the sentence in which they appear, thus overriding the referential possibilities of the nominal form. The basic discovery underlying the BT was that the syntactic structure of the sentence was found to determine this distinction between free and bound anaphora, at least partially. For example, the configurational relation of “c-command” of one element by another in the hierarchical structure of a sentence and the notion of “governing category” (a measure of syntactic locality) were found to allow certain nominal interpretations and also provide constraints on them.