Reflexive Binding Research Articles

Binding of Reflexives in Polish as Agree, Move, and Late Spell-Out

Abstract: This paper considers components necessary for a successful account of A-binding relations in Polish, a language with subject-oriented reflexives and a binding domain delimited by the Tensed Sentence Condition. Following the presentation of major relevant data points in Polish, two comprehensive theories of binding—the Agree-based theory, presented in Reuland 2011, and the Move-based theory, presented in Boeckx et.al. 2008—are briefly outlined and applied to said data. It turns out that the two theories, in their most orthodox forms, fall short of achieving empirical adequacy. Subsequently, a positive theory of A-binding is proposed which combines upward Agree, movement (and copy pronunciation) of the bound element, similar to movement of clitic/weak pronoun in Polish, and a lexicalization algorithm modeled upon the proposals in Safir 2014 and Nikolaeva 2014. It is shown in a number of derivations with possessives how both the subject and the object engage in binding relations as antecedents and how their dependents become lexicalized as either reflexive or pronominal.

Acquisition of empathy in child Japanese

ABSTRACT This article investigates the acquisition of empathy verbs in child Japanese, focusing on verbs of giving/receiving: age-ru ‘give,’ kure-ru ‘give,’ and mora(w)-u ‘receive.’ These verbs are distinguished by which argument the speaker empathizes with when describing an event. For age-ru ‘give,’ the speaker empathizes with the subject (the giver); for kure-ru ‘give,’ the speaker empathizes with a non-subject (the recipient), and for mora(w)-u ‘receive,’ the speaker empathizes with the subject (the recipient). Using two diagnostics for empathy (alignment of first person with empathy loci; empathy loci being preferred antecedents in reflexive binding), children 4–6 years old were tested. Our experiments show the following two findings: (i) children found kure-ru as most challenging, partially contradicting previous research; (ii) some children as young as age 4 have fully acquired the empathy-encoding properties of these verbs despite the speaker’s empathy being unobservable in the input. We discuss the challenges that kure-ru poses for children in light of the potential learnability problem that these empathy verbs pose.

Binding Interpretations of Korean EFL Learners: Focusing on SSC-violating English Reflexives

This study investigated how Korean EFL learners would respond to pragmatically salient English reflexives that violate syntactic binding condition. Specially focusing on English sentences with reflexives violating SSC (Specified Subject Condition, Chomsky, 1980), the study probed whether the EFL learners – compared with English native speakers – would accept Long-Distance (LD) binding of English reflexives, which is syntactically not allowed in English. In addition, the study examined whether different types of experimental stimuli (i.e., simultaneous vs. sequential presentation of context-sentence material) could affect the interpretations of English reflexives. A picture-based Truth Value Judgment Task, composed of 80 test items, was conducted with 46 Korean EFL learners and 22 English native speakers. The results demonstrated the following: i) Korean EFL learners showed higher acceptance rates than English native speakers with the sentences representing LD-binding of SSC-violating antecedent (i.e., core binding violation in English), especially when the contextual information given by pictures preferred LD–antecedents; ii) Distinct types of experimental stimuli-presentation (i.e., simultanoues vs. sequential) did not make significant effects.

Negative polarity item (NPI) illusion is a quantification phenomenon.

Illusions of grammaticality have often been used to probe the properties of the human sentence processor in syntactic activities like subject-verb agreement, reflexive binding, and negative polarity item (NPI) licensing. Originally, NPI licensing in processing was thought to be a product of cue-based retrieval. Mounting evidence that the NPI illusion is far from universal suggests that a revised account is necessary. We examine the distribution of the NPI illusion using a single methodology and evaluate its compatibility with existing theories. We find that most licensors fail to show illusion behavior but the negative quantifier no and the quantificational phrase not a single trigger illusion in high and low relative clause positions. This evidence indicates that distribution of NPI illusion is not predicted by existing processing accounts. Future explanations must engage the unique properties of negative quantifiers to account for the distribution of the NPI illusion phenomenon. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Binding reconstruction and two modes of copy-chain interpretation

We present a theory for the interpretation of Ā-movement chains at LF in the copy theory of movement where the NP restrictor of a DP Ā-movement chain is interpreted in only one copy. Such a view is motivated for English by evidence from reflexive binding, building on observations in Barss 1986, and its interaction with parasitic gap licensing and weak crossover effects. Our approach offers a means for understanding the classification of Ā-movement types in Cinque 1990 and Postal 1994 in copy-theoretic terms.

Binding in Turkish Nominal Phrases: A Phase-Sliding Account

There are studies within literature which claim that nominal phrases such as DPs also constitute phases in addition to v *Ps and CPs (Chomsky, 2006; Hiraiwa, 2005; Marantz, 2007; Ott, 2008 and Svenious, 2004 among others). Every phase is subject to a strict locality condition, i.e. Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky, 2001), which forms an opaque domain for external probes. As one of the phenomenon subject to this strict locality, anaphor binding is allowed only within a given phase, since each phase is a local domain for the binding to occur. However, binding in Turkish CPs and DPs behave differently from each other. While the former allows only local reflexive binding, the latter allows distant reflexive binding as well. If DPs are also assumed to be phases, then they must not allow distant reflexive binding. I claim that this problem is an extension of an operation referred to as phase-sliding. It is an operation that extends the phase boundary by pushing up the borders of a spell-out domain (Gallego, 2010). It occurs when a phase head H 0 is raised to another head X 0 to form a complex [H 0 +X 0 ]. This study aims to show that this operation accounts for the asymmetry between the binding behaviors of the two phases, i.e. DPs and CPs.

Similarities and Differences between Child and Adult L2 Learners in the Acquisition of English Reflexives

This paper reports on an experimental study which tested the claims of the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis and the Domain-by-Age-Model by comparing the performances of Arabic- and Chinese-speaking child and adult L2 learners in the acquisition of English reflexives. Whilst English and Arabic allow only local binding of reflexives, Chinese allows local and long-distance binding of reflexives. 60 L2 learners were given a word-based mean length of utterance proficiency test to confirm their proficiency level and, then, they were divided into six groups: Arabic-speaking children (n = 15); Arabic- speaking adults (n = 15); Chinese-speaking children (n = 15); Chinese- speaking adults (n = 15); an L1-English child (mean age 9.60) control group (n = 15); and an L1-English adult control group (n = 15). L2 learners’ interpretation of English reflexives was elicited through a 48-item Simon-Says- game. The results showed significant differences between the performance, of the L2 groups, and that of native speakers; yet, the majority of L2 learners were close to an 83.33% acquisition threshold. Also, by showing no significant difference between the child and adult L2 groups, the results indicated support for the Domain-by-Age-Model. As for the syntactic difference between reflexives and pronouns, L2 learners did not differentiate between them, scoring higher in reflexives.

(Under)specification of the person feature in relative clauses

By examining ϕ-agreement in relative clauses, this paper investigates the relation between syntax and morphology in terms of the person feature. English relativized subjects appear to have different phi-features for the purposes of subject-verb agreement and binding relations. The verbal morphology uniformly displays 3rd person whereas reflexive binding shows 1st/2nd person in addition to 3rd person. If subject extraction must trigger an invariable verbal form as Ouhalla (1993) argues, the binding alternations cannot be accounted for. This paper proposes dual properties of the person feature based on Harley and Ritter’s (2002) feature geometry, and argues that relativized subjects may not obtain both properties of the person feature from the head noun via Agree. This partial agreement causes morphosyntactic variation in English and cross-linguistically in Distributed Morphology (DM). The current analysis demonstrates that referential and morphological (under)specifications are kept separate under the cons...

Teasing Apart Explanations of a Developmental Delay in Binding: Experimental Evidence from the Comparison of SLI and Williams Syndrome

abstractThis study investigates the knowledge of binding in 21 English-speaking children with SLI, aged 6;08–16;05, compared to 21 children with WS, language- and age-matched, and 21 language-matched control children, aged 4–7;10. Our results demonstrate no difficulties in the interpretation of reflexive or personal pronouns in SLI, revealing an intact knowledge of reflexive binding, as well as spared pragmatic functioning. Children with WS, however, show difficulties with their interpretation of pronouns, accepting the local binding of a pronoun, indicating impaired pragmatics. Not surprisingly, our language-matched typical controls, aged 4–7;08 (M = 5;03), showed a classic pattern of the Apparent Delay of Principle B Effect (ADPBE). In view of reported pragmatic but not memory deficits in WS, we interpret our results as consistent with the pragmatic deficit explanation but not the memory deficit explanation of the ADPBE.

On the Aspects of Reflexive Binding by Chinese and English Learners of Korean

This study investigated 1) whether learners’ L1 and proficiency levels affect the acquisition of Korean reflexive jasin and 2) how syntactic knowledge of reflexive binding interacts with pragmatic knowledge among a control group (40 native speakers of Korean) and an experimental group (20 Chinese learners of Korean and 13 English learners of Korean). The experimental group was divided into an intermediate and an advanced level. For data collection, this study guided the participants to conduct two interpretation tasks with multiple choice questionnaires. Task 1 employed three types of sentences: monoclausal, biclausal finite, and biclausal non-finite, which are pragmatically neutral without any contexts. Task 2 basically used the same sentences used for Task 1, but included two different contexts which strongly favored a specific antecedent of the reflexive jasin. The data were analyzed by the frequency of responses to each type of sentences. The overall results show that learners’ L1 and L2 proficiency can affect the interpretation of L2 reflexive binding, and that pragmatics plays important roles in the interpretation of reflexive binding to the extent that it overrides syntax.

Retrieval Interference in Syntactic Processing: The Case of Reflexive Binding in English.

It has been proposed that in online sentence comprehension the dependency between a reflexive pronoun such as himself/herself and its antecedent is resolved using exclusively syntactic constraints. Under this strictly syntactic search account, Principle A of the binding theory—which requires that the antecedent c-command the reflexive within the same clause that the reflexive occurs in—constrains the parser's search for an antecedent. The parser thus ignores candidate antecedents that might match agreement features of the reflexive (e.g., gender) but are ineligible as potential antecedents because they are in structurally illicit positions. An alternative possibility accords no special status to structural constraints: in addition to using Principle A, the parser also uses non-structural cues such as gender to access the antecedent. According to cue-based retrieval theories of memory (e.g., Lewis and Vasishth, 2005), the use of non-structural cues should result in increased retrieval times and occasional errors when candidates partially match the cues, even if the candidates are in structurally illicit positions. In this paper, we first show how the retrieval processes that underlie the reflexive binding are naturally realized in the Lewis and Vasishth (2005) model. We present the predictions of the model under the assumption that both structural and non-structural cues are used during retrieval, and provide a critical analysis of previous empirical studies that failed to find evidence for the use of non-structural cues, suggesting that these failures may be Type II errors. We use this analysis and the results of further modeling to motivate a new empirical design that we use in an eye tracking study. The results of this study confirm the key predictions of the model concerning the use of non-structural cues, and are inconsistent with the strictly syntactic search account. These results present a challenge for theories advocating the infallibility of the human parser in the case of reflexive resolution, and provide support for the inclusion of agreement features such as gender in the set of retrieval cues.

Binding Principle A in English and Northeast Asian Languages

In this paper, a long distance binding of reflexives in Northeast Asian languages such as Korean, Japanese and Chinese is revisited with Binding Principle A in Chomsky (1981). It is argued that the apparent differences between English and Northeast Asian languages result from the interaction of the ECP, depending on whether Infl is a lexical or a functional category. In addition, it is assumed that reflexives can be divided into two different forms: nonphrasal forms (casin, zibun, ziji in Northeast Asian langauges) vs. phrasal forms (himself, myself etc. in English). Nonphrasal form reflexives can be either local or long distant, whereas phrasal form reflexives are strictly local. Thus, seemingly different bounded dependencies between reflexives and their antecedents can be accounted for by the same principle with parameters.

Reflexive Binding and Adjunct Control as Subject Diagnostics in Korean: An Experimental Approach

What makes a subject has been one of the hottest topics in Korean syntax, and several diagnostics have been proposed. Among the diagnostics, the current study chose two tests and experimentally investigated how they worked in single subject constructions (Non-MSCs) and multiple subject constructions (MSCs). The diagnostics examined in this study were Reflexive Binding (RB) and Adjunct Control (AC). An experiment was designed to test how these two subjecthood diagnostics applied to the Non-MSC and MSC environments. The intuition of seventy Korean native speakers was tested with magnitude estimation. The test items were composed of 80 Korean sentences which represented different subjecthood properties in Non-MSCs and MSCs. The analysis results show that (1) both RB and AC can be used as subjecthood diagnostic tests in the Non-MSC environment, but (2) that only RB can be used as a subjecthood diagnostic test in the MSC environment. (Chungnam National University.Seoul National University.Soongsil University)

Intact grammar in HFA? Evidence from control and binding

This study contributes original results to the topical issue of the degree to which grammar is intact in high-functioning children with autism (HFA). We examine the comprehension of binding and obligatory control in 26 HFA children, mean age=12;02, compared with two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children: one matched on non-verbal mental age (MA), mean age=9;09, and the other on verbal MA, mean age=8;09. On the binding task, our HFA group showed a good performance on reflexives on a par with TD matched children, in line with recent reports of intact knowledge of reflexive binding in higher but not lower-functioning children with autism. Their comprehension of personal pronouns was somewhat poorer, with no difference observed between the groups, again supporting the existing literature. Results on the control task, which probed mastery of syntactic relations never previously examined in autism, revealed that both HFA children and the two matched TD groups were at ceiling on single-complement subject control (try) and object control (persuade). However, a considerably poorer attainment on double-complement subject control (promise) was present equally in the HFA group and the verbal MA-matched TD group but not in the non-verbal MA-matched group. Performance on promise correlated with age only in the verbal MA-matched group, whilst in HFA it correlated with general cognitive and language abilities.These novel findings demonstrate that regular obligatory control and reflexive binding are preserved in HFA. We contrast these results with previous literature that has demonstrated deficiencies with passives and raising in HFA populations. The emerging bifurcation suggests different analyses for the principles underlying these constructions: whereas the latter incorporate movement, control and binding do not. The poor performance on promise supports all previous literature on this lexically and syntactically idiosyncratic construction. Its breaking of locality, which in turn results in a conflict between lexical and syntactic requirements, is exceptional and introduces an extra step of learning. This step appears to be related to maturation in TD children, and to stronger language and cognitive skills in HFA children.

Phases, Reflexives, and Definiteness

AbstractThis paper investigates a puzzling correlation between two seemingly disparate phenomena: the crosslinguistic distribution of reflexive possessives and definiteness marking. As observed in Reuland 2007, 2011 and supported here by additional crosslinguistic evidence, reflexive possessives are available only in languages that either lack definiteness marking or encode definiteness postnominally. Languages that have prenominal (article‐like) definiteness marking, on the other hand, systematically lack reflexive possessives. I argue that such facts support a particular approach to reflexive binding—specifically, one that has the following properties: (i) binding domains are stated in terms of phases, (ii) in addition to CPs and vPs, DPs are phases, and (iii) DP is not universal. I closely examine another robust crosslinguistic correlation regarding definiteness marking—Bošković's (2008) Left Branch Extraction generalization—and show how it directly follows from the key assumptions of the analysis. I situate my proposals within a broader context of the phase theory, arguing that the syntactic representation of (in)definiteness is the crucial factor in determining the phasehood status of nominal categories. I extend my analysis to the clausal domain and discuss it in the context of languages that allow reflexives in the subject position.

The mereology of structural universals

This paper explores the mereology of structural universals, using the structural richness of a non-classical mereology without unique fusions. The paper focuses on a problem posed by David Lewis, who using the example of methane, and assuming classical mereology, argues against any purely mereological theory of structural universals. The problem is that being a methane molecule would have to contain being a hydrogen atom four times over, but mereology does not have the concept of the same part occurring several times. This paper takes up the challenge by providing mereological analysis of three operations sufficient for a theory of structural universals: (1) Reflexive binding, i.e. identifying two of the places of a universal; (2) Existential binding, i.e. the language-independent correlate of an existential quantification; and (3) Conjunction.

Reflexivity and Reflexive Predicates in Korean

Korean has sentences that contain no overt reflexives but show reflexivity of predicates. Based on Park’s (1985) observation, and following his terminology, we call predicates occurring in such sentences reflexive predicates. The paper is an attempt at providing an account of the nature of reflexive predicates mainly depending on the theory of reflexivity presented by Reinhart and Reuland (1993). In the course of the discussion, we will also review the weaknesses of the canonical binding theory and see that the theory of reflexive binding based on reflexivity of predicates fits well in accounting for Korean reflexive predicates.

Reflexive binding: awareness and empathy from a syntactic point of view

In this paper we develop an analysis of reflexive binding involving the reflexive zibun in Japanese. We argue that the reflexive zibun is bound in a minimal domain defined by the POV (point of view) feature, which entails that zibun requires local binding. In what appears to be a case of long distance binding, zibun is in fact locally bound by pro that occupies Spec of the POV projection, which is open to control by a Sentient focus or an Empathy Focus depending the nature of the POV head. This accounts for the different behaviors of the reflexive zibun with respect to the Awareness condition and Empathy. The analysis also has empirical consequences for subject orientation and the Blocking Effect with reflexive binding.

Lingering misinterpretations of garden path sentences arise from competing syntactic representations

Recent work has suggested that readers’ initial and incorrect interpretation of temporarily ambiguous (‘‘garden path’’) sentences (e.g., Christianson, Hollingworth, Halliwell, & Ferreira, 2001) sometimes lingers even after attempts at reanalysis. These lingering effects have been attributed to incomplete reanalysis. In two eye tracking experiments, we distinguish between two types of incompleteness: the language comprehension system might not build a faithful syntactic structure, or it might not fully erase the structure built during an initial misparse. The first experiment used reflexive binding and the gender mismatch paradigm to show that a complete and faithful structure is built following processing of the garden-path. The second experiment used two-sentence texts to examine the extent to which the garden-path meaning from the first sentence interferes with reading of the second. Together, the results indicate that misinterpretation effects are attributable not to failure in building a proper structure, but rather to failure in cleaning up all remnants of earlier attempts to build that syntactic representation.

Predictive processing of syntactic structure: Sluicing and ellipsis in real-time sentence processing

This paper investigates the prediction of syntactic structure during sentence processing, using constructions that temporarily allow a sluicing interpretation in English. Making use of two well-known properties of sluicing and pronoun interpretation—connectivity effects and the local antecedent requirement on reflexives, respectively—we show that (1) the parser chooses a sluicing structure over other possible structures when sluicing is a possibility, and (2) the structure which the parser posits for sluicing involves detailed hierarchical syntactic structure. A self-paced reading experiment and three offline experiments (two acceptability rating studies and a sentence completion study) find evidence that readers immediately try to associate a reflexive pronoun embedded inside a wh-phrase with a potential antecedent in the preceding clause. However, this association is made only if a sluicing structure is a possible continuation of the sentence. This finding suggests that readers actively anticipated a sluicing structure when it was grammatically permissible, and that this structure is sufficiently detailed to license reflexive binding. This result adds to the increasing evidence that comprehenders make detailed predictions regarding upcoming linguistic structure.