Binding of relational nouns and the variable-free semantics

  • Authors:

  • Hiroaki Nakamura

  • Affiliations:

  • Dept. of Liberal Arts, Kure City, Hiroshima, Japan

  • Venue:
  • JSAI-isAI'10 Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

This paper examines how the binding relation can be established between discontinuous possessor and possessee NPs in Japanese. Japanese has various peculiar constructions involving relational nouns, in which their possessors seem to appear in positions quite far from their original positions. Without positing empty pronouns as necessary in the standard theory of binding, we adopt the variable-free semantics proposed by Jacobson [3], [4] and [5] to give a unified account to binding phenomena in these constructions. In the binding-without-pronoun approach, we can associate discontinuous possessor and possessee NPs using the type-shift rule for binding, assuming that binding should not be dealt with as relations between linguistic expressions, but as relations between argument slots of functional expressions.