Anaphor Binding and Narrative Point of View: English Reflexive Pronouns in Sentence and Discourse

Abstract

This paper offers a detailed survey of occurrences of English reflexive pronouns which are marked with respect to the binding theory of Chomskyan generative grammar. Through a large corpus of attested examples found in contemporary nonlinguistic prose, English reflexive pronouns are shown to violate Chomsky's Binding Principle A in a productive way. The proposed grammar of these violations draws a clear-cut line between syntax and discourse, and shows Chomsky's Binding Principle A to be (a) essentially correct for English if it is clearly defined as a theory of sentence-internal, discourse-independent anaphora; but also (b) crucially incomplete, since it ignores a whole component of the grammar of reflexives and thus fails to account for an open set of data.