Introduction

One of the major foci of linguistic research during the last decade has been the development of a theory of binding. Despite a reasonable amount of consensus on major issues, there are a number of persistent anomalies. Especially, an integrated view of so-called long-distance anaphors is lacking. The present book sets out to contribute to the development of such a view. In the individual chapters a number of important issues in the theory of local and long-distance anaphors are analysed. The purpose of this overview is to summarize and interpret the results. In section 2 we provide the necessary background. Section 3 summarizes the individual contributions and puts them into context. Section 4 presents an overview of the facts reported. Section 5 discusses a major result of the book as a whole: the existence of just two main classes of A-anaphors.

Binding theory and its parameters

The starting point of most current discussions of anaphora is the binding theory (BT) developed by Chomsky in a series of works from 1973 on. (1) gives the formulation in Chomsky (1981).

1. A. An anaphor is bound in its governing category.

2. B. A pronominal is free in its governing category.

3. C. An R-expression is free.

The definition of ‘governing category’ is given in (2).

(2) b is a governing category for a if and only if b is the minimal category containing a, a governor of a, and a SUBJECT (accessible to a).

Introduction

It has been known for quite some time that the binding theory developed in Chomsky (1981) and subsequent work does not account for the full range of binding facts (cf. Maling (1982), Giorgi (1984), Chomsky (1986a), Everaert (1986a), and others): The scope of conditions A and B is limited to binding within the domain of the first accessible subject, the local domain. Therefore, non-clausebounded reflexives, which are commonly referred to as long-distance (LD-) anaphors in languages as diverse as Icelandic, Finnish, Polish, Latin, Chinese, Japanese, etc., cannot be captured (see the various contributions in this volume for discussion and references). Even within the domain to which conditions A and B apply, language does not fully live up to their predictions. In a number of environments pronouns can be found where condition B excludes them. Well-known examples are English sentences of the type John saw the snake near him, reflexive verbs in Dutch and French which allow locally bound first and second person pronouns in object position, and Frisian, where this latitude also obtains with third person object pronouns (see Everaert (chapter 4), and Bouchard (1984)).

For years, a unified theory of the various anaphors across languages seemed somewhat unfeasible, in view of the massive differences reported concerning their distribution, particularly in the case of LD-anaphors. A major breakthrough, however, has been the discovery that a distinction is needed between logophoric processes and structural binding relations.

This volume is a collection of original articles on the nature of the anaphoric systems in a variety of languages and from a number of different perspectives. The aim of the editors is to provide a new impetus to the study of long-distance anaphors, a phenomenon with ramifications that are rather puzzling from the perspective of the binding theory in its canonical form (as in Chomsky (1981)). All of the contributions are concerned with extending that theory in a manner that is as restrictive as possible. Some of the solutions solidly remain within the domain of the structural binding theory. In other cases, developing a restrictive theory required recognizing different components in binding, and assigning a specific role to pragmatic factors. Many of the articles converge, however, in important respects, leading to considerable simplification of the overall picture. The patterns found in the languages covered are so consistent that they cannot be accidental (although one would certainly wish to investigate a larger number of languages).

Most of the articles originated as contributions to a workshop on long-distance anaphora organized by the Department of Linguistics of Groningen University, 18–20 June 1987. The editors added a first chapter in which the main results of the volume are put together. The original plans were for this chapter to be written by the editors together with Tanya Reinhart, who participated in the workshop as a discussant.