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4 - Binding versus coreference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Daniel Büring
Daniel Büring
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Summary

In this chapter we will refine the interpretation procedure developed in chapter 2. An important distinction – that between coreference and binding – will be introduced, motivated, and technically implemented. An early and very lucid explication of the distinction is found in Bach and Partee (1980), so lucid, in fact, that I'll simply quote it:

Let's summarize the places where something like coindexing is used in the literature:

  1. (1) The same pronoun appears in several places in a sentence:

  2. He said he was OK.

  3. (2) A pronoun appears together with a referring NP:

  4. John said that he was OK.

  5. (3) A pronoun appears together with a quantificational NP:

  6. No woman doubts that she is OK.

  7. (4) A pronoun occurs in a relative clause:

  8. … the woman who said that she had found the answer.

  9. (5) A reflexive or other obligatorily bound pronoun appears in a sentence:

  10. John loves himself

  11. Oscar is out of his head.

It is really only in situation (1) (in some sentences), and (2) that it seems appropriate to talk about coreference. In every other case (…) coindexing a pronoun with some other expression is a shorthand way of saying that the pronoun in question is being interpreted as a bound-variable …

Other authors have emphasized this point, too, in particular Tanya Reinhart (Reinhart, 1982, 1983a, b).

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Chapter
Information
Binding Theory , pp. 81 - 103
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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