The Binding Theory has been widely studied in various linguistic theories. Most of these studies such as Government-Binding Theory and Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar have focused on how to analyze the Binding constructions only either by syntact...
The Binding Theory has been widely studied in various linguistic theories. Most of these studies such as Government-Binding Theory and Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar have focused on how to analyze the Binding constructions only either by syntactic approach or by a few constraints. Accordingly these studies cannot provide an appropriate analysis to the examples which are containing somesemantic, pragmatic and contextual depen-dent elements.
(1) John was going to get even with Mary. That picture of himself in the paper would really annoy her, as would the other stunts he planned.
Examining a wide range English data like sentence (1), we can find that the GB binding theory, which is based on the configurational notion of c-command, is on the wrong track.
The purpose of this study is to provide a novel way to deal with these data in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar(HPSG) developed by pollard and Sag(1987, 1992) and many others. Here an alternative Binding Theory is presented which is based not on c-command, but rather on the relative obliqueness of grammatical relations. These notions, together with a variety of processing and discourse factors, have been argued to provide an account of English binding superior to that developed within GB or to Binding Theories based on the hierarchy of thematic relations first presented in Jackendoff(1972).