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Bound‐Variable Anaphora and Left Branch Condition
Author(s) -
Marelj Marijana
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
syntax
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.587
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-9612
pISSN - 1368-0005
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9612.2011.00156.x
Subject(s) - anaphora (linguistics) , variable (mathematics) , pronoun , computer science , linguistics , set (abstract data type) , upper and lower bounds , point (geometry) , natural language processing , mathematics , artificial intelligence , philosophy , resolution (logic) , geometry , mathematical analysis , programming language
. Since the seminal work of Reinhart (1976, 1984), it has been recognized that the structural configuration for bound‐variable anaphora is that of c‐command. One way of deriving this variable‐binding condition is to capitalize on the similarities between traces and bound pronouns and to analyze the latter as spelled‐out traces (see Aoun 1982, also Hornstein 2001 for a somewhat different implementation of Aoun’s idea). Taking Hornstein’s (2001) analysis of bound pronouns in English as a starting point, I account for some puzzling differences between English and Serbo‐Croatian in the domain of the intrasentential pronominal anaphora. By establishing the correlation between the way English and Serbo‐Croatian behave with respect to the Pronoun Insertion strategy, on the one hand, and the Left Branch Condition (Ross 1967/1986), on the other, I argue that the differences under consideration boil down to the presence or absence of a DP‐layer in a given language. The validity of this hypothesis is tested on a broader set of crosslinguistic data, including data from Dutch, Latin, Russian, and Spanish. The analysis I put forth supports the minimalist view of binding (Hornstein 2001, 2006; Grohmann 2003) as well as accounts of left branch extraction languages as D‐less (Uriagereka 1988; Corver 1992; Bošković 2005, 2008).