Course:

Lecturer: Sascha Alexeyenko (Göttingen)

The goal of this course is to provide an overview of the basics of the "standard" Binding Theory, from both a syntactic and a semantic perspective. We will start with the syntactic distribution of different types of pronominal elements and a discussion of the major structural constraints on their occurrence. We will then proceed to the semantic interpretation of pronouns, introduce the mechanics of assignment functions and predicate abstraction, and model the difference between coreference and semantic binding. In the final part of the course, we will discuss further constraints on binding, crossover effects, semantic binding without c-command, the possibility of treating binding as a type of feature agreement, and some other topics.