Binding Conditions of English Reflexives and Pronouns in the ICE-USA

Abstract

This study investigates how the syntactic and pragmatic conditions on the distributions of English reflexives and pronouns are reflected in the International Corpus of English (ICE) – USA corpus. The study attempted to compare different theoretical approaches to binding phenomena – Standard Binding Theory (SBT), HPSG-based Binding Theory and Logophoricity theory – in their predictions. 1,500 English sentences were extracted from ICE-USA corpus to be encoded with 8 syntactic-pragmatic factors related to the binding conditions of reflexives/pronouns. The results demonstrated the following: i) English reflexives and pronouns were mostly in complementary distribution; ii) English reflexives showed apparent cases of LD-exempt/discourse binding; iii) Structural constraints such as c-command and binding domain were rarely violated with reflexives having sentential antecedents; iv) Outside the syntactic domain, proper logophoric conditions for licensing the LD-reflexives were observed. The results call for incorporation of discourse-pragmatic analysis with syntactic approaches to explain various binding phenomena.