A Selective History of Modern Binding Theory

The articles in this book are concerned with the treatment of various anaphoric phenomena. The framework is that first introduced by Chomsky (1973) and successively revised and refined throughout the 70’s and ‘80’s. In this chapter, I will present a highly selective history of one line of investigation during that period in what has come to be known as Binding Theory (BT). I will be concerned with how Binding Theory as explicated by Chomsky has changed, but also with how it has remained the same (sometimes despite appearances to the contrary); with how changes in other modules of the theory have precipitated changes in BT; and with general theoretical concerns, for example, the rule of the desire to eliminate redundancy in the theory. Where appropriate, I will indicate how the articles comprising this book fit into the developments discussed. All references to Chapters will be to those in this book. In the interests of clarity, these articles will be referred to by their chapter numbers as well as by their original dates of publication, thus Chapter 4 [Lasnik (1976)]. It should be kept in mind that publication dates can be misleading as to history, since the large majority of the books and articles referred to in this chapter were in fairly general circulation in manuscript form long before they were actually published.