Binding Theory

is sentence has two meanings that depend on how she is semantically interpreted. On one meaning, she refers to the same individual that Sally does. On this interpretation, we say that she is “coreferent” with Sally. On the other interpretation, she refers to some female individual that isn’t Sally. On this interpretation we say that she and Sally are “disjoint in reference.” One way of expressing these two meanings is to add to our syntactic representation of DPs something that encodes what they refer to. e standard device used for this function is something called an “index.” Indices are integers that are appended to DPs. When two DPs have the same index, then they Sometimes lower case roman letters are used. are given a coreferent interpretation. And when two DPs have dišerent indices, they are given the disjoint referent interpretation. So the two meanings that (1) has can be paired with the representations in (2).