Introduction

One of the major foci of linguistic research during the last decade has been the development of a theory of binding. Despite a reasonable amount of consensus on major issues, there are a number of persistent anomalies. Especially, an integrated view of so-called long-distance anaphors is lacking. The present book sets out to contribute to the development of such a view. In the individual chapters a number of important issues in the theory of local and long-distance anaphors are analysed. The purpose of this overview is to summarize and interpret the results. In section 2 we provide the necessary background. Section 3 summarizes the individual contributions and puts them into context. Section 4 presents an overview of the facts reported. Section 5 discusses a major result of the book as a whole: the existence of just two main classes of A-anaphors.

Binding theory and its parameters

The starting point of most current discussions of anaphora is the binding theory (BT) developed by Chomsky in a series of works from 1973 on. (1) gives the formulation in Chomsky (1981).

1. A. An anaphor is bound in its governing category.

2. B. A pronominal is free in its governing category.

3. C. An R-expression is free.

The definition of ‘governing category’ is given in (2).

(2) b is a governing category for a if and only if b is the minimal category containing a, a governor of a, and a SUBJECT (accessible to a).