Anaphor Binding and Narrative Point of View: English Reflexive Pronouns in Sentence and Discourse

1989/12/01 by Anne Zribi-Hertz · 1 voice · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Linguistics and Language Studies #Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

paper · doi:10.2307/414931

openalex publication_date 1989/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/30

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, discourse-independent 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.

Cited by

• proas a Minimal nP: Toward a Unified Approach to Pro-Drop

Discussions

• I read R&R in grad school, which is why I thought of it first, but Zribi-Hertz (1989) gives a much more extensive list of these non-reflexive uses. [bsky, 2 points, 1 comments]

Related

• Anaphora and Discourse Structure
• Resolving Anaphors in Embedded Sentences
• Anaphoric Binding: an integrated overview
• The role of aspect on anaphora resolution in English as a first and second language
• Focusing for Pronoun Resolution in English Discourse: An Implementation