CHAPTER 6

BINDING THEORY

A. Locality Condition
The locality condition is where the anaphor describes co-referential with its antecedent
having the same clause. Also when correference and indexing are together, intsignifies that
they are co-referential because they have the same reference (referring to the same person or
other thing)
Consider a pair of sentence like the following :
a. Katy thinks that Taylor hurt herself
The antecedent in the sentence above shows katy and taylor. In this section herself is not part
of the co-referential because of the difference between the two clauses That is why in this
section it is not in accordance with grammar/ungrammatical and matches with local
conditions.
Now is how we can clarify the meaning of this locality condition is to look at the
performance of the basic nominal expressions, and there are devided into three parts, namely
Anaphors, Pronominals and R-expressions
As we can see below is an example of an Interpretation of the nominal expression:
(1) Lisa loves herself
(2) Lisa said that Katlyn loves herself
(3) (3) Lisa said that Katlyn loves her
(4) Lisa said that Katlyn loves the girl
The tree diagrams of : Lisa said that Katlyn loves her
How to determine nominal expressions in the example sentences above can be seen in the first
sentence of anaphor herself which refers to Lisa’s antecedent, for the second part the co-
referential is Katlyn, banan pronominal can be construed with lisa or other people, and in the R
expressions the girl can’t be connected with lisa or Katlyn.
B. Anaphors
In the case of anaphores, from my understanding, anaphors are used to create co-referentials with
their antecedents. Which is where the anaphor must be bound by antecedent. Each anaphor must
have a coindexed, c-commanding and antecedent NP with the same sentence.
Binding
A relationship between the c-command of the co-indexed and its antecedent. In the previous
sentence (first sentence) it is like Lisa’s antecedent which is grammatically appropriate. But in
the second sentence it is an anaphor of herself which can only be a co-referential to Katlyn.
Meanwhile, lisa can’t because of differences in clauses and locality conditions. That’s why it’s
important to have a correlation between co-referential and antecedent.
Principle A
Each anaphor must have an index with an appropriate and correct NP. In Principle A of the
binding theory, an anaphor must have a clause match. This is explained like sentence (2) Lisa
said that (Katlyn saw herself)
In this sentence, the anaphor herself only can bind to Katlyn because it is included in that clause.
There is an anaphoric compulsion when looking at Lisa’s NP which is not according to the rules
of Binding Theory.