Generalizing the Presuppositional Approach to the Binding Conditions

Abstract

Almost all current approaches to the binding theory (the conditions that regulate covaluation between NPs within a sentence) have accepted the view of Reinhart (1983a,b), according to which the binding theory should regulate only syntactic binding and not coreference. In this paper, I argue that this is incorrect, and we need a binding theory that regulates both binding and coreference, as the classical binding theory had it (e.g., Chomsky 1981). I also show some problems with the idea that the binding conditions somehow involve or should reduce to syntactic movement or syntactic agreement (Agree), as many recent works argue. I suggest instead that we should pursue a presuppositional approach to the binding conditions, as proposed by Sauerland (2013) for Binding Condition A. I spell out such an analysis and illustrate some benefits of pursuing it.