#binding theory

How do we know who "he" is? And how does "he" differ from "himself" when we interpret it? In this week's episode, we talk about the syntax and semantics of pronouns: how we can place them in sentences, how they link up to variables, and the role of context in how we interpret them.

Binding theory.

Back on our video about theta roles, we got a question about verbs like “eat”, which we want to say require a theme. So saying like “I eat” seems incomplete, somehow - what are you eating, right? But at the same time, if someone asks “What are you doing?” and you say “I’m eating”, that doesn’t seem like it’s necessarily missing anything. So what’s going on there?

Well, somewhere in between transitive verbs (which absolutely need an object to follow them, like "arrange" or "make") and intransitive verbs (which need nothing at all, like "fall" or "explode"), we have optionally transitive verbs, like "eat" or "clean"; they're happy with or without something following them. These "null objects" can be found in other languages, too, like Italian; in the sentence "Questo conduce (la gente) alla seguent conclusione," meaning "This leads people to the following conclusion," the direct object "la gente" is placed inside parentheses because it can be left out. And if you think about it, things are even messier than that! Like, some verbs which are normally intransitive can have what's called a cognate object -- an object which is closely related to the verb. The verb "laugh" works on its own, but we can also say that someone "laughed a good laugh". And the same goes for  "dance".

Getting back to words like "eat": on the one hand, we want to acknowledge that something has to have been eaten; after all, you can't eat something that doesn't exist! On the other hand, we want to allow our verbs to run around wild and free sometimes, understanding that its object is never far behind. One way to do this is to say that there are two versions of "eat" in English: one which needs an object, and another which doesn't.

But like William of Ockham said, "plurality must never be posited without necessity", meaning that we shouldn't invent something new unless we absolutely have to! And we don't have to invent another version of "eat", because we can already make a distinction between obligatory and optional theta roles. After all, we can modify plenty of actions with all sorts of extra words and phrases -- things that refer to times, places, reasons, and more! Like, we could say "Rachel ate her vegetables in the kitchen at suppertime so she could grow up big and strong." And the only part that’s really necessary are the first four words.

That being said, we've talked about the fact that the obligatory and optional parts of a sentence tend to occupy different positions in a syntactic tree, and according to our tests, the object of "eat" really does seem to be genuinely obligatory. We usually can't separate an obligatory object from its verb, and since we can't say "Rachel ate in the kitchen her vegetables", it looks like "her vegetables" is normally sitting in the part of the tree reserved for VIPs (very important phrases).

So if that’s true, the one thing that we have left to try is to suppose that a verb like "eat" always has an object, even if we can't hear it. It might sound a bit strange for us to argue something's there when it obviously isn't overtly present, but we actually have independent reasons for thinking that some of the stuff that finds its way into a sentence doesn’t get pronounced.

Take a sentence like "Respect for oneself is important." If you think back to our episode about Binding Theory, you might recall that reflexive words like "oneself" are only allowed in places where some other phrase is near enough to connect to it. In this case, "oneself" presumably connects to whoever's doing the respecting. Since this sentence seems not to violate Principle A, we might tentatively conclude that there is something invisible there, just before "respect", acting as a kind of unpronounced agent. This silent subject serves to bind the reflexive pronoun, and the sentence makes out okay. And this lines up with our intuition that a word like "respect" must assign some kind of theta role to whoever or whatever is doing the respecting, since we can say "Rachel respects herself enough to eat her vegetables" but can't leave out "Rachel."

How do we know how to interpret our pronouns? What rules guide what meanings can go with what words? In this week's episode, we talk about binding theory: what a pronoun even is, where different pronouns can get their interpretation from, and what principles of syntax oversee our understanding of all the nouns we talk about.

What do you guys think of this?

Johni wondered whoj saw which pictures of himself*i/j.