A Multifactorial Analysis of Binding Conditions in British English Using ICE-GB Corpus

Abstract

The present study examines the distributions of English reflexives in their comparisons with pronouns as proposed in Binding Theory through corpus-based as well as corpus-driven linguistic approach. In order to obtain empirical evidence related to the distributions of reflexives and pronouns in real sentences, ICE-GB corpus representing British English (BrE) was used. A multi-factorial regression analysis was adopted to investigate 26 possible morpho-syntactic, semantic and pragmatic conditions related to binding phenomena that have been suggested in the previous theoretical and experimental studies on binding. One thousand sentences including reflexives and pronouns were extracted from the ICE-GB corpus and 26 linguistic factors were encoded manually. Then, the data were statistically analyzed in R (using multifactorial analysis). Overall results observed from the analysis were as follows: (i) the reflexives and pronouns in BrE are clearly in complementary distribution at least in grammatical binding contexts within sentences; (ii) eleven main factors and five interactions with the number of clause-embedding were found to be statistically significant.