1 Binding Sharon Armon-Lotem

2 John i shaved himself i 1.John likes himself 2.John likes him 3.He likes John 4.*Himself likes John 5.John thinks that Bill likes him 6.He thinks that Bill likes John 7.John thinks that Bill likes himself

3 Binding conditions A: anaphors must be bound in their local domain B: pronouns must be free in their local domain C: R-expressions are always free The coindexation resembles A-movement, but no theta role transmission is involved The binding local domain varies across languages

4 Issues in acquisition Which words are pronouns and which are reflexives. What the local domain is. Principle A vs. principle B. Comprehension vs. production

5 Solan (1987 – (Act-out task, 37 children, ages 4-7.

6 Chien & Wexler (1990) – Pictures selection, 150 children, ages 2;6-6;6 This is Goldilocks; this is Mama bear. Is Mama bear touching herself/her? Children older than 5 obey principle A. Younger children allow non-local antecedent: Goldilocks = herself Children seem to violate principle B even after 6;6

7 But Children obey principle B at the same age that they obey principle A, but violate a pragmatic principle which governs the choice of reference (Reinhart 1983, 1986). Coreference is possible without coindexing on a pragmatic basis (contrastive stress). Children who are not sensitive to contrastive stress would seem to violate principle B ( McDaniel 1992) Grice’s principles of cooperation (maxim of manner) – use the most precise way to say what you want to say - use him only when you do not mean himself. This is hard for children (Grodzinsky & Reinhart 1993)

8 Binding in SLI Franks, S. L., Connell, P. J Knowledge of Binding in Normal and SLI Children. Journal of Child Language, 23, Reflexives NL - pass through a long-distance binding stage LI - behave like very young NL requiring the nearest available noun phrase to be the antecedent.

9 van der Lely HK, Stollwerck L Binding theory and grammatical specific language impairment in children. Cognition 62(3):

10 Bishop et al Grammatical SLI: A distinct subtype of developmental language impairment? Applied Psycholinguistics 21, 159–181 Advanced Syntactic Test of Pronominal Reference (Figure 2, A)

11 Results LI (SD=2.90) LN21.41 (SD=2.53) (t = 5.61, p <.001). “Baloo Bear says Mowgli is tickling him” “Baloo Bear says Mowgli is tickling himself” (X) “Mowgli says Baloo Bear is tickling him” (S)

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