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.

It would seem to be appropriate for the occupant of a new Chair in an ancient and major university to present in his Inaugural Lecture, before an audience representative of many different subjects taught and studied in the university, a justification of the subject he is called upon to profess – an apologia pro disciplina sua: to discuss its relation to other disciplines and the contribution it is capable of making to the accepted aims of the university in teaching and research. In my lecture this evening, I will claim a place for linguistics at all levels and in many areas of university activity: as a field of research for scholars confident that they are making a significant contribution to the sum of what we call “science” – that they are, as the currently fashionable phrase puts it, “advancing the frontiers of knowledge” – and also as a subject with important practical, or “technological” applications; and, at the same time, as a discipline which can be combined with many different courses of university instruction, as a valuable part of a general education.

This then is the task I have set myself in my lecture, and I am conscious of all the difficulties that stand in the way of its successful accomplishment.

The immediate and most readily identifiable sources of this chapter are, on the one hand, Katz's (1981) book, Language and Other Abstract Objects, which supplies part of the title, and, on the other, Pateman's (1983) article, ‘What is a language?’. The ideas that it contains are ideas that I have held, I think, for many years; but I have been greatly assisted in clarifying them, to my own satisfaction at least, by reading and pondering the two works that I have just mentioned and others by the same authors (Katz, 1984; Pateman, 1982, 1985).

My title deliberately echoes the title of Katz (1981): I have, however, substituted the term ‘abstraction’ for his ‘abstract object’, and I will explain presently why I have done this. More immediately to the point, it also echoes, and is intended to evoke, his initial formulation of the goals of the philosophy of linguistics:

There are several points worth noting here. For present purposes, it suffices to mention the following:

1. (i) English, Urdu, etc. are implicitly classified as natural languages;

2. (ii) a grammar of a natural language is assumed to be a theory of that language;

3. […]

Summary

In this chapter the anaphoric/pronominal system of Finnish will be discussed. A close look at Finnish anaphors and pronouns leads to the conclusion that the binding relations in Finnish can only be adequately accounted for if we assume that there are two kinds of binding domains, each with its own binding rules. Therefore, a theory of binding will be proposed which distinguishes between binding in a small domain, i.e. local binding, and binding in a larger domain, i.e. long-distance binding.

Introduction

In Chomsky (1981) a binding theory is proposed which states that an anaphor must be bound within the minimal maximal projection containing the anaphor, a governor for the anaphor and a subject or Agr accessible to the anaphor (called the governing category of the anaphor), while pronouns must be free within this domain. However, various languages, e.g. Icelandic and Italian, contain anaphors that can be bound by an antecedent outside this domain (cf. Yang (1984)). Although these anaphors obviously do not obey Chomsky's binding theory, they are very systematic in their behaviour, and hence have to be included in a general theory of binding. This raises the important question of how this is to be done: is long-distance binding (binding outside Chomsky's governing category) to be considered as local binding in a larger domain, or are there any fundamental differences between long-distance binding and local binding? An inspection of the Finnish anaphoric/pronominal system indicates the latter.

The purpose of this article is to initiate a discussion of the ‘parts of speech’ within the framework of generative grammar. The present writer has long been of the opinion that the traditional, ‘notional’ theory of the ‘parts of speech’ merits a rather more sympathetic consideration than it has received from most linguists in recent years and feels, with Chomsky (1965: 118), that ‘although modern work has, indeed, shown a great diversity in the surface structures of languages …, the deep structures for which universality is claimed may be quite distinct from the surface structures of sentences as they actually appear’, and that ‘the findings of modern linguistics are thus not inconsistent with the hypotheses of universal grammarians’. The distinction that is drawn by Chomsky between ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ structure was implicit in traditional grammatical theory and has been reasserted by a number of modern scholars (cf. also Hockett, 1958; Lamb, 1964b; Halliday, 1966c: 57; etc.). This distinction will be taken for granted throughout the paper. It will also be taken for granted that any satisfactory general theory of syntactic structure must be ‘transformational’ (in the sense of Chomsky, 1957; etc.). Towards the end of the paper, however, it will be suggested, on the basis of the arguments presented below, that current theories of transformational grammar stand in need of radical revision; in particular, that the rules of the base component should operate upon two different kinds of elements, ‘constituents’ (bracketed categories) and ‘features’ (for the most part, the traditional ‘secondary grammatical categories’ – tense, mood, aspect, etc.).

Introduction

It has been known for some time that the primacy condition of anaphora assumed in standard binding theory, requiring c-command of the anaphor by the antecedent, is insufficient in non-configurational languages, in which coarguments mutually c-command each other (cf. É. Kiss (1981), Hale (1983), Mohanan (1983–4), Marácz (1986)). The c-command condition of anaphora is also inadequate in certain constructions of configurational languages, e.g. English. Among other inadequacies, it is too permissive in licensing anaphoric relations between coarguments occupying hierarchically equally prominent positions.

As this chapter will point out, the standard c-command condition on binding is also insufficient in licensing pronominal variable binding. Its failure is, again, most extensive in non-configurational languages, but the constraint also breaks down in various constructions of configurational languages.

This chapter proposes a primacy condition of binding which adequately constrains both antecedent–anaphor relations and operator–pronominal relations in configurational and non-configurational languages alike. The proposed primacy condition involves three interacting primacy principles: S-structure c-command, S-structure precedence, and precedence in a thematically motivated lexical argument hierarchy.

Anaphor binding

Principle A of the binding theory formulates the following requirement for anaphors:

(1) An anaphor is bound in its governing category.

(See Chomsky (1981), and, for a more complex formulation of the locality condition of anaphora, Chomsky (1986a).)

The primacy condition of anaphora is specified in the definition of the term ‘bound’:

(2) a is bound by b iff a and b are coindexed, and b c-commands a.

It is an interesting, and initially surprising, fact that at the very time when what was already coming to be known as Darwinism was being rapidly and enthusiastically adopted as the new scientific paradigm, the Linguistic Society of Paris, the most prestigious such learned society of the day, anathematized all speculation, whether Darwinian or not, about the origin of language. Since then, it has been traditional for philologists and linguists speaking or writing on this topic to begin by referring to this fact, apologetically or defiantly as the case may be, and by quoting the relevant statute of 1866: “The Society does not accept papers on either the origin of language or the invention of a universal language”. Why, it may be asked, did the founding fathers adopt such an apparently obscurantist attitude?

What may now be thought of as the standard view of linguists was expressed in typically forthright fashion by Whitney, whose words have frequently been quoted:

In this paper I shall be concerned with what Quine (1960: 108) describes as the first two phases in the ontogenesis of reference. Like Quine, I shall venture no psychological details as to the actual order in which “the child of our culture” masters the “provincial apparatus of articles, copulas, and plurals” as he “scrambles up an intellectual chimney, supporting himself against each side by pressure against the others” (1960: 102, 80, 93). What I have to say about the child's acquisition of the grammar of referring expressions is not incompatible, as far as I am aware, with any of the data that has been collected and discussed in the psycholinguistic literature: but I am not claiming that all children “of our culture”, and still less children of all cultures, must go through the same stages in the acquisition of their native language and that these stages must succeed one another in a fixed order. My purpose, rather, is to show how the grammatical structure and interpretation of referring expressions (other than proper names) can be accounted for in principle on the basis of a prior understanding of the deictic function of demonstrative pronouns and adverbs in what might be loosely described as concrete or practical situations. I will argue that the definite article and the personal pronouns, in English and other languages, are (in a sense of ‘weak’ to be explained below) weak demonstratives (see Sommerstein, 1972; Thorne, 1973), and that their anaphoric use is derived from deixis.

Introduction

Recent research shows that anaphoric elements pattern in at least two different ways: some of them obey a strict locality condition, and others do not. In the first case an anaphor requires an antecedent in a local domain and in the second case the binding domain is extended. Local domains and their extensions may vary from language to language. The goal of this chapter is to present a description of binding domains for Polish anaphors.

Polish is a Slavonic language. The group of Slavonic languages has hardly been investigated in the light of the binding theory developed in Chomsky (1981). Some of the facts to be discussed will be unexpected from the perspective of current theory. I trust that the conditions under which they can be accommodated will shed light on the nature of parametrization.

Section 2 of this chapter presents Polish binding facts. Section 2.1 gives some general background about Polish, and 2.2 about the Polish anaphoric/pronominal system. Anaphoric relations within simplex clauses are described in 2.3 and anaphoric relations across clause boundaries in 2.4 (clauses with tenseless complements) and 2.5 (clauses with participial complements). The NP as a binding domain will be discussed in 2.6.

Section 3 of this chapter discusses the binding theory for Polish. In 3.1 binding domains for anaphors are investigated, and in 3.2 domains for pronominals. In the last section (3.3) it will be shown how the binding theory applies to Polish.