Title: Anaphor Binding and Narrative Point of View: English Reflexive Pronouns in Sentence and Discourse
Abstract: This paper offers a detailed survey of occurrences of English reflexive pronouns which are marked with respect to the binding theory of Chomskyan generative grammar. Through a large corpus of attested examples found in contemporary nonlinguistic prose, English reflexive pronouns are shown to violate Chomsky's Binding Principle A in a productive way. The proposed grammar of these violations draws a clear-cut line between syntax and discourse, and shows Chomsky's Binding Principle A to be (a) essentially correct for English if it is clearly defined as a theory of sentence-internal, discourseindependent anaphora; but also (b) crucially incomplete, since it ignores a whole component of the grammar of reflexives and thus fails to account for an open set of data.*
Publication Year: 1989
Publication Date: 1989-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 289
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