Third person effects on binding

Abstract

The article provides evidence from a number of languages that sentences which are structurally identical, and differ only in morphological number, display different binding options: 1st and 2nd person sentences allow instances of pronominal binding (e.g. “I am not thinking of me”) while structurally identical sentences in the 3rd person do not (e.g. “*Hei is not thinking of himi”). Such evidence presents a problem for existing versions of the binding theory. It is argued that the data under discussion can be accounted for in terms of a discourse “avoid ambiguity” factor operating on 3rd person, but not on 1st and 2nd person, pronouns. The article contends that the binding options of 3rd person pronouns are determined by both structural (syntactic) and nonstructural (discourse) factors, while the binding options of 1st and 2nd person pronouns are determined by structural factors alone, and in this sense only the latter represent a pure case of syntactic binding. It therefore follows that attempts at formulating structural (syntactic) constraints on binding should avoid 3rd person pronouns as the picture there is additionally complicated by the operation of a discourse factor (avoid ambiguity) and should deal with binding of 1st and 2nd person pronouns, as only they reflect structural conditions on binding. In reality, however, studies investigating anaphoric binding deal almost exclusively with instances of binding in 3rd person sentences, which may have negatively affected current formulations of locality constraints on binding.