Binding Constraints as Instructions of Binding Machines

Binding Constraints as Instructions of Binding Machines António Branco Dept. of Informatics, University of Lisbon Faculdade de Ciências de Lisboa Campo Grande, 1700 Lisboa, Portugal Antonio.Branco@di.fc.ul.pt Abstract Binding constraints have resisted to be fully integrated into the course of grammatical processing despite its practical relevance and cross-linguistic generality. The ultimate root for this is to be found in the exponential "overgenerate & filter" procedure of the mainstream rationale for their satisfaction. In this paper we design an alternative approach based on the view that nominals are binding machines. Introduction Binding constraints are an important set of filters in the process of anaphor resolution1. As they delimit the relative positioning of anaphors and their possible antecedents in the grammatical geometry, these constraints are of crucial importance for restricting the search space for antecedent candidates and enhancing the performance of resolvers. From an empirical perspective, they stem from quite robust generalizations and exhibit a universal character, given their parameterized validity across natural languages. From a conceptual point of view, in turn, the relations among binding constraints involve non-trivial symmetry, which lends them a modular nature. Accordingly, they have typically been taken as one of the most intriguing and robust grammar modules. 1 See Annex for examples and the definition of binding constraints. In contrast to this, however, the formal and computational handling of binding constraints has presented non-negligible resistance when it comes to their integration into the representation and processing of grammatical knowledge. In its mainstream formulation, the methodology for verifying the compliance of grammatical representations with binding constraints requires a series of extra grammatical parsing steps (Chomsky, 81). More recently, prominent unification-based frameworks either require special purpose extensions of the description formalism for a partial handling of these constraints (LFG: Dalrymple, 93), or offer no integration yet for them into the grammatical setup (HPSG: Pollard and Sag, 94, Backofen et al., 96). Our primary aim in this paper is to bridge this gap between the grammatical nature of binding constraints and their full integration into grammar processing. In Section 1, we review previous steps towards this goal proposed in the literature. Building on these contributions in Section 2, we introduce the rationale of a new methodology for the verification of binding constraints. In Section 3, in the light of this new approach, we show how these constraints are fully integrated into grammar and the drawbacks of current methodology are overcome. 1 The Coindexation Paradigm The specification of binding constraints have greatly evolved in the last three decades. The device of coindexation for marking anaphoric links has, however, remained quite stable. This stems from the fact this device is at the heart of the mainstream methodology for verifying these constraints, a methodology whose basics were proposed in (Chomsky, 80, 81) and have been adopted since then in its different variants. 1.1 Post-grammatical overgeneration and filtering This methodology can be outlined as in Fig.1. As noted as early as in (Correa, 88), this approach is grossly inefficient. Later Fong, 90, showed that its …

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