Indexing and a Referential Dependencies Within Binding Theory: Computational Framework

INDEXING AND REFERENTIAL DEPENDENCIES WITHIN BINDING COMPUTATIONAL FRAMEWORK Fabio Pianesi Istituto per la Ricerea Scientifica e Tecnologica 38050, Pante' di Povo - Trento - Italy pianesi@irshit THEORY: A ABSTRACT This work is concerned with the development of instruments for GB parsing. An alternative to the well known indexation system of (Chomsky, 1981) will be proposed and then used to formalize the view of Binding Theory in terms of the generation of constraints on the referential properties of the NPs of a sentence. Finally the problems of verification and satisfiability of BT will be addressed within the proposed framework. 1 Introduction This work is concerned with the development of instruments for GB parsing (see Barton, (1984); Berwick (1987); Kolb & Tiersch, (1990)); in particular, our attention will be focused on the Binding Theory (henceforth, BT) a module of the theory of Government and Binding (henceforth, GB; see Chomsky (1981; 1986)). It has been pointed out (eg. in Kolb & Tiersch, (1990)) that the lack of a complete and coherent formalization of a linguistic theory like GB can be a major obstacle in addressing the issue of principle-based parsing; this is true of BT too, in particular with respect to the indexing system of Chomsky (1981), the shortcomings of which have often been pointed out in the literature. A formalism for the treatment of the referential relationships among the NPs of a sentence will be presented that is more expressive than indexation and more effective as a computational tool. In Section 2 the indexing system and the role it plays within BT will be discussed; in Section 3, an alternative will be developed that overcomes some of the shortcomings of indexing. Such a system will, then, be used to formalize the view of BT as a device that generates (syntactic) constraints on reference. In Section 4, it will be shown how our proposal could be applied to some computational problems, i.e. the problems of verification and satisfiability within BT. 2 Preliminaries Since Chomsky (1981), it has become commonplace to denote the interpretative relations among the NPs of a sentence by means of indices, i.e. integers attached to NPs in such a way that elements bearing the same index are taken to denote the same object(s), while different indices correspond to different denotations; most of the statements of BT have been |aid down in terms of this system (Chomsky, 1981, 1986). In a number of works (see Chomsky (1981), Higginbotham (1983) and Lasnik & Uriagereka (1988)), however, it has been pointed out that the indexing device is not adequate to capture certain referential relations; this is true for the relation between pronouns and split antecedents, i.e. antecedents composed of two or more arguments bearing different thematic roles, l Furthermore, indices blur the distinction between coindexing under c-command and coindexing without c-command, thereby making it difficult to capture the dependence of an element, behaving like a variable, upon its antecedent (see Reinhart, (1983)). 2 The replacement of indices with index sets has been proposed …

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