25th Annual Meeting of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics (IATL 25) Ben Gurion University of the Negev – October 13, 2009 Variable Binding and The Person-Case Constraint 1 Rajesh Bhatt UMass Amherst bhatt@linguist.umass.edu Radek ˇ Sim´ ık Rijksuniversiteit Groningen r.simik@rug.nl 1 Bound and Free Pronouns Does the grammar distinguish between free pronouns and bound pronouns? (1) local binding: clearly YES a. *John i likes him i . b. John i likes himself i . What about non-local binding? (2) a. John i thinks that Mary will introduce him i to the Pope. b. John thinks that Mary will introduce him to the Pope. Does the grammar care that the him in (2a) is bound while the him in (2b) is free? In this talk, we provide empirical evidence that this is indeed the case. • The syntactic make-up of bound and free pronouns must be different. On top of that, our findings support the view advocated since Reinhart (1983), namely that when- ever an interpretation can be arrived at by a representation involving binding, this representation must be used, even if it violates some binding condition. • The grammar favors bound representations over free representations. Probably the most adequate and simple implementation of this idea to date comes from Roelofsen (to appear). (3) Rule S Any interpretation of a given clause X that could be obtained via a logical form of X that violates Condition B (or other syntactic constraints on binding) is illicit. Our data comes from certain restrictions that hold on variable binding into clitic clusters, which we call the Clitic Binding Restriction. Organization of the rest of the talk §2 The Clitic Binding Restricton: basic facts §3 The Person Case Constraint, a related restriction on clitic clusters §4 Towards a unification of CBR and PCC §5 Further issues 1 We are grateful to the following people for their judgements and comments: Serbo-Croatian: Miloje De- spi´ c; Spanish: Maria Biezma, Luis Lopez, Paula Menendez-Benito, Maribel Romero, Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Luis Vicente; Catalan: Eul` alia Bonet; French: Philippe Schlenker; Slovenian: Peter Jurgec. A special thanks to Philippe Schlenker. 1