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.