Pronouns: syntax, semantics, processing (PSSP 2015)
Higher School of Economics, Moscow, June 16—19, 2015
Short descriptions of summer school lectures
Tuesday, June 16
9:30-11:00. Barbara Partee. Lecture 1.
Reference, coreference, and binding, up to the 1980’s.
What is the semantic relation between a pronoun and its antecedent? The first idea is
“identity”; the pronoun is a shorter substitute for its antecedent. What is “identity”? That
question was a concern of the Stoics and has been a central issue for philosophers,
linguists, and logicians studying anaphora. We will review the basic distinction between
coreference and variable binding, and the important progress that was made starting in
the 1960’s on sorting out the roles of syntax, semantics and pragmatics in different kinds
of anaphora, and early attempts to identify the different principles involved.
11:15-12:45. Eric Reuland. Lecture 1.
From unity to diversity.
In this lecture I will present a brief history of the Binding Theory and the challenges
posed to it by the cross-linguistic variation, as well as certain responses in the field to
this variation. Further I will discuss the question of why there would be conditions on
binding at all and the problems with syntactic indices that led to their elimination from
the theory. Next, the 'logical syntax definition of A-binding' presented in Reinhart 2006
will be introduced. Finally, I will be teasing apart the role of predicates and conditions on
pronoun binding on the basis of the contrast between Dutch and Frisian.
13:00-14:30. Colin Phillips. Lecture 1.
Psycholinguistics of anaphora – what are the questions?
On the first day the focus will be on establishing the goals of a psycholinguistic theory of
anaphora, and the methods that are used to achieve those goals (reaction times, eye
fixations, electrophysiology, speed-accuracy tradeoff, etc.). We will also discuss what
representations of antecedents are accessed, evidence on the resolution of coreference
vs. binding, and a detailed example of the time course of resolving a simple(-ish)
constraint on anaphora.
Wednesday, June 17
9:00-10:30. Eric Reuland. Lecture 2.
What's the matter with local binding of pronominals?
What is the difference between binding and coreference and how can we establish that
the dependent element is indeed (used as) a pronominal rather than an anaphor? How
can we account for the fact that a language like Frisian allows local binding of 3rd person
pronominals, whereas a closely related language like Dutch doesn't. Problems with a
number of extant analyses based on the absence of a competitor will be discussed.
Pursuing an agree-based approach (Reuland 2011, Pesetsky & Torrego 2007) it will be
shown how the Dutch-Frisian contrast follows from a small difference in their Case
systems and effects of economy of encoding. This role of economy will be embedded in
a more general discussion of the division of labor between components of the language
system, and – time permitting - related to experimental results in processing economy
(Koornneef, Avrutin, Wijnen, Reuland 2011).
10:45-12:15. Colin Phillips. Lecture 2.
From grammatical constraints to memory mechanisms.
The focus on the second day will be on relating grammatical constraints on anaphora
and cataphora to memory access mechanisms that are guided by those constraints. This
leads to a discussion of models of encoding and access in memory, especially evidence
for so-called content-addressable memory (CAM). Well-motivated memory architectures
create a tension with the form of well-motivated linguistic constraints. This has
implications for the implementation of anti-locality constraints, blocking effects, and
more.
12:30-14:00. Barbara Partee. Lecture 2.
Binding, quantification, and the puzzles of anaphora.
What binds bound variables? In first-order logic, variables are bound by quantifiers. In
higher-order logic with a rich type theory, bound variables are primarily bound by
lambdas, not by quantifiers. We will review this fundamental change in perspective on
the relation between syntax and semantics that came with early formal semantics. We will
also review the semantic side of binding theories, and the difference between pronouns
and reflexives. Reflexives come in several kinds; the biggest semantic distinction is
probably between reflexives as bound variables and reflexives as argument-structure
operators. We close lecture II with a set of puzzles about kinds of pronouns that don’t fit
the basic canonical classification of coreference vs. bound variables.
Thursday, June 18
9:00-10:30. Colin Phillips. Lecture 3.
Child-adult parallels in the (mis-)interpretation of anaphora.
There are striking parallels between children’s profile of non-adultlike interpretations of
anaphora and the findings from moment-by-moment interpretation in adults. In a
nutshell: adults’ first interpretation is children’s only interpretation. Children’s profile
raises important questions about how interpretations are generate and evaluated in real
time.
10:45-12:15. Barbara Partee. Lecture 3.
Donkey anaphora, discourse anaphora, and the rise of dynamic semantics.
The work initiated by Irene Heim and Hans Kamp on “donkey anaphora” and discourse
anaphora ushered in the era of dynamic semantics. The central puzzles solved by the
Kamp-Heim theories concerned donkey anaphora and discourse anaphora with indefinite
antecedents. Their work also brought out and elucidated major parallels among principles
governing pronominal anaphora, temporal anaphora, presupposition projection, and
other context-dependent phenomena, which we will review.
12:30-14:00. Eric Reuland. Lecture 3.
Why must reflexivity be licensed and how?
This lecture starts with an overview of the means languages use to represent reflexive
predicates, and show how conditions on reflexivity are to be distinguished from
conditions on pronominal binding. An overview will be presented of extant approaches to
this issue and the problems they face. The idea to be pursued is that reflexive predicates
require special licensing due to the fact that the computational system cannot handle
two identical variables in a local domain. Consequently the 'logically' most
straightforward representation is avoided. Two licensing strategies will be discussed: i) a
bundling operation on thematic roles (Reinhart & Siloni 2005); ii) protection strategies,
using representations where the two variables are not strictly co-arguments. The lecture
will be concluded with a discussion of some methodological issues that arise in the
cross-linguistic investigation of reflexivity.
Friday, June 19
9:00-10:30. Barbara Partee. Lecture 4.
Implicit anaphoric expressions, implicit binding
In the final lecture, we will concentrate on differences between null anaphora and overt
anaphora. We will also look at puzzles concerning anaphoric properties of open class
words like local -- do they have null implicit arguments, or anaphoric ‘parts of their
meanings’, or what? We will leave more time than usual at the end of the session for
extra questions-and-answers and discussion.
10:45-12:15. Eric Reuland. Lecture 4.
From diversity to unity: Some challenging cases
In this lecture I will discuss some challenging cases, including the analysis of locally
bound pronominals in the Uralic language Khanty, but also the interesting patterns of
binding in Bahasa Indonesia and related languages, and the prima facie very divergent
binding patterns in two closely related variants of Zhuang (a Tai Kadai language spoken
in Southern China). As an illustration of the way in which independent properties of the
grammatical system may interact with binding, the variation in long-distance binding
within Germanic will be discussed, together with its implications. Further issues that will
come up concern local binding of pronominals in Fijian, Chamorro and Haitian creole.
12:30-14:00. Colin Phillips. Lecture 4.
Beyond Binding Theory
The scope of the final day’s discussion will be guided by the progress on the previous
days, and by ideas from the syntax and semantics lectures. We will examine the
implementation of a broader range of constraints and biases on anaphora, and how that
integrates with the mechanisms explored on Day 2. Time permitting, we will also explore
extensions to anaphoric domains such as ellipsis and resumptive pronouns.