TUSSAUD MEETS THE BINDING THEORY

The principle of language that allows one to refer to a statue by using the name of the person the statue portrays (the 'statue rule') is generally taken to be a rule of pragmatics, well outside concerns of syntactic theory. However, there proves to be an interaction between binding theory and the statue rule, impossible if binding theory is syntactic and the statue rule is pragmatic. A number of possible solutions are explored that keep traditional binding theory intact; these all prove problematic. The solution to be developed extends the theory of binding tof Jackendoff (1990a), in which binding is a relation among constituents of conceptual structure, and in which syntactic anaphora is the syntactic expression of such binding. A conceptual structure binding condition is proposed that accounts for the interaction of binding and the statue rule; this also accounts for several problematic cases normally taken to fall under syntactic binding theory.