Using synchronous tree adjoining grammar to model the typology of bound variable pronouns

This paper presents a novel analysis of bound variable anaphora using Synchronous Tree Adjoining Grammar (STAG), a pairing of a Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) for syntax and a TAG for semantics. While a bound variable pronoun can occur at a distance from its binder, as in ‘Every girli believes that shei is intelligent,’ languages vary, though in a limited way, as to how near or far from its binder a bound variable should be. As any dependency between two syntactic objects must be localized to a single predicate domain in TAG, modelling bound variable anaphora in syntax and semantics poses an interesting challenge for STAG. In our analysis, bound variable pronouns are represented as Multi-Component sets in both syntax and semantics, composing in delayed tree-local derivations. This allows us to not only account for variable binding at a distance, but it also allows us to define a single derivational parameter from which observed patterns of bound variable locality can be derived, ruling out unobserved patterns, capturing the range of interpretive possibilities for bound variable pronouns across languages.