Kinds of Derivational Binding

Recent work in syntactic theory has been much concerned with the issue of derivationality vs. representationality in the application of syntactic principles. Arguments for an essentially derivational approach to syntactic relations, whereby syntactic principles apply in an on-line fashion, during the course of the derivation, rather than at independently identified levels of representation such as Surface Structure (SS), Logical Form (LF) and so on, go back to Belletti & Rizzi 1988, and more recently have been revived in various forms in Kitahara 1997, Epstein et al 1998, Grewendorf & Sabel 1999, Epstein & Seely (eds) 2002 and the papers therein, Saito 2003, 2005, and for Russian in Bailyn 2007, as well as in many other places. Theoretical arguments for a derivational approach to syntactic relations, stemming from the Minimalist Program of Chomsky 1995, accompany the empirical ones discussed in many of the works cited above; I will not review these arguments in detail – naturally a theory that can dispense with reference to particular levels of representation is superior to one that cannot, all else being equal (although see Brody 1995 and elsewhere for the opposite view). My purpose in this article is to show evidence from binding that argues in favor of a certain kind of derivationality, which I call “applicational derivationality” (AD) while at the same time to argue against another kind of derivationality, represented by work