On The Necessity of Binding Conditions 1986

Abstract

I will be concerned in this paper with the binding conditions — the structural requirements governing certain anaphoric relations. I will give particular attention to “Condition C” effects, and will argue that, contrary to a currently popular view, something like Condition C does indeed exist. That is, I will display a wide variety of facts motivating Condition C which cannot be handled by, for example, independently motivated pragmatic constraints (see Reinhart (1983) for extensive discussion of such constraints) or by core properties of the theory of “Linking” (Higginbotham (1983)). A number of the arguments will be seen to carry over to Condition B as well. [It is on these grounds, of course, rather than on logical or biological grounds, that I will attempt to motivate the “necessity” of binding conditions, as one can surely conceive of an organism, even an evolutionarily successful one, whose linguistic system allows, say, the binding of a pronoun within its governing category.] In the course of the discssion, it will become evident that a partial reformulation of Condition C is in order, but its basic nature as a structural constraint on binding will remain intact.