Binding, Relativized
Dominique Sportiche
November 2023
 

NB: This version: minor revisions of version 3. The central idea proposed here, to address a set of binding problems noted in Heim (1994), is that the binding conditions must be relativized: it suffices that they hold for someone, e.g. the speaker only or some other sentence internal, attitude holder only. I first show that appealing to intermediate de se read binders to address these problems as in Heim (1994) or Sharvit (2011) is neither necessary nor sufficient. Instead, I capitalize on the proposal that the Binding Conditions A and B should be relativized: the semantic covaluation they require (or prohibit) must (resp. can’t) hold in the same world, that is for (a) particular thinker(s) /attitude holder(s) whose point of view is adopted. Thus, by using a reflexive or a pronoun, a speaker encodes that in their local binding domains, reflexives whether plain or exempt must be locally covalued for particular thinkers (in their modal worlds), and pronouns can’t be locally covalued for any thinker. This yields unexpected cases of satisfaction or violation of Condition A and B. Such a thinker can be the speaker of the utterance, or a logophoric center whose point of view is adopted to convey attitude content. In effect, this proposal generalizes the treatment of Free Indirect Discourse given in Sharvit (2011), taking Free Indirect Discourse as a special case of Logophoric contexts.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/005487
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: UCLA ms.
keywords: binding theory, semantics, syntax
previous versions: v3 [August 2022]
v2 [June 2022]
v1 [August 2020]
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