LOCALITY AND ANAPHORIC BINDING

This paper examines certain issues in anaphoric binding, within the general Framework of the Government-Binding theory of Chomsky (1981) and others. It falls into three parts. The first part descriptively distinguishes cases of local ((1) and (2a)) and nonlocal ((1) and (2b)) binding of anaphors. As a rough initial characterization, a reciprocal or reflexive is locally bound if it is bound in the minimal NP or S containing it and its governor. The core cases of the local binding of PRO occur when it is the subject of a subcategorized verb complement (e.g. of try). A (perhaps partial) characterization would be that PRO is locally bound when the category containing it is predicated of its antecedent, in the sense of Williams (1980).