Anaphoric binding

This chapter is an introduction to the Binding Theory assumed within HPSG. While it was inspired by work on Government & Binding (GB), a key insight of HPSG's Binding Theory is that, contrary to GB's Binding Theory, reference to tree structures alone is not sufficient and reference to the syntactic level of argument structure is required. Since argument structure is tightly related to semantics, HPSG's Binding Theory is a mix of aspects of thematic Binding Theories and entirely configurational theories. This chapter discusses the advantages of this new view and its development into a strongly lexical binding theory as a result of shortcomings of earlier approaches. The chapter also addresses so-called exempt anaphors, that is, anaphors not bound inside of the clause or another local domain.