Binding Machines

Abstract

Binding constraints form one of the most robust modules of grammatical knowledge. Despite their crosslinguistic generality and practical relevance for anaphor resolution, they have resisted full integration into grammar processing. The ultimate reason for this is to be found in the original exhaustive coindexation rationale for their specification and verification. As an alternative, we propose an approach which, while permitting a unification-based specification of binding constraints, allows for a verification methodology that helps to overcome previous drawbacks. This alternative approach is based on the rationale that anaphoric nominals can be viewed as binding machines.