Earticle

This paper is designed to illustrate how the anaphoric relations are processed in the syntactic derivation under the C-command condition. Binding Theory has depended on the C-command condition, in that an antecedent must C-command a reflexive pronoun. However, the Minimalist perspectives claim that once entering into the syntax course, all lexical items should be processed via Agree and Merge. Especially, Agree mechanism demands that a probe with unvalued features should locate its potential goals all in its C-command area. Instead of indexing, the φ features specified on lexical items can show the reference identification between a reflexive/pronoun and its antecedent via syntactic operations. I propose that the modified φ feature specifications on each DP are more useful to reveal the relation between a reflexive and its antecedent than indexing. There is a remaining problem as to what makes a reflexive related to its antecedents. There is no probe-goal relation between an antecedent and a reflexive. It may be possible that a head T probes for both the two DPs. For this purpose, we should find out the way for a head T to probe the two multiply.

The ultimate goal of this paper is to provide an empirical analysis of the adult subjects’ acquisition of the c-command condition. A major point to note is that the L2 learners looked for similarities between Korean binding and English binding. The results from the adult subjects suggest that the L2 learners may not entertain Chomsky’s UG theory that learners have complete access to Universal Grammar. A further point to note is that the L2 learners have difficulty acquiring the c-command condition due to markedness. The results from the adult subject’ responses show that the markedness of L2 impedes L2 learning. With respect to the order of binding, the L2 learners acquired condition B before condition A. Finally, the key findings of our research are that the c-command condition which appears in the embedded sentence was first acquired by the L2 learners, followed by the c-command condition which occurs in the genitive NP, the c-command condition which appears in the conjunct sentence, the c-command condition which occurs in two separate sentences, the c-command condition which appears in the sentence involving wh-movement, and the c-command condition which occurs in topicalization, in that order.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relation between anaphor and antecedent based on agree and to suggest more flexible one by employing the narrowest c-command. The antecedent of an anaphor must be found within the local clause through feature sharing. The features for them to share are Φ features, which are interpretable valued for antecedents, but which are interpretable unvalued for anaphors. Thus, these features can explain the relation between them. This agree-based approach is closely related to the two kinds of c-command relations. One is a sister-contain relation where probe with unvalued features must search its goals down with valued features and get values. The other is a sister relation made by merging two constituents. Upon merging the two from the numeration, they should c-command each other and share with each other. This paper suggests that the latter relation called the narrowest c-command be more efficient than the former one. This agree-mechanism can be useful: (i) faster syntactic derivational process, (ii) more powerful phase heads, and (iii) more flexible probe- goal relation. This paper claims that the narrowest c-command enables most structures to make the strong derivational process.

Of the core syntactic relations in UG, nothing is more gregarious than c-command. It plays a key role in at least three different domains: binding, linearization and movement. However, in terms of the Minimalist Program, it is desirable for c- command to be eliminated from linguistic theory. This paper explores the syntactic properties of c-command in the phenomena of binding, linearization and movement. I argue some advantages of the analysis without recourse to the c-command relation and examine their problems. The proposal of this study is to discuss the possibility of eliminating the c-command relation in each case

Kim, No-ju. “The Two Structure-sensitive Constraints OCP(XP) and C-command in Korean Prosodic Phrasing.” Studies on English Language & Literature. 35.4(2009): 271-289. N. Kim’s previous studies have shown that properties both of phonology and of syntax play a significant role in defining a P-phrase in Korean. Among the constraints that play major roles in N. Kim’s studies, the constraints OCP(XP) and C-command are structure-sensitive in that they make a judgement on syntactic structures the words of an identical P-phrase can or cannot have. Though these two constraints played major roles in N. Kim’s previous studies, it turns out (i) that the constraint OCP(XP) is no longer necessary and (ii) that the constraint C-command needs to be revised. Eliminating OCP(XP) and making a revision to C-command, this paper aims to simplify and develop the area of prosodic phrasing in Korean phonology. (Kyungpook University)

While it is commonly assumed that a bound variable pronoun that covaries with a quantified phrase must be c-commanded by its quantified antecedent (Reinhart 1983), there are many counterexamples reported in the literature that show that c-command is not a requirement for covariation (Barker 2012). In processing, there is suggestive evidence that c-command has an effect in variable binding (Cunnings et al. 2015, Kush et al. 2015). Moulton and Han (2018) found that bound pronouns can access c-commanding quantified antecedents early in processing, but not non-c-commanding antecedents?even when a bound variable interpretation is possible. Lakhani and Schwarz (2024), however, report that when Moulton and Han’s test sentences were modified to facilitate the covarying interpretation of the pronoun, the processing difference between c-commanded and non-c-commanded pronouns disappeared. In this paper, we test the processing effect of c-command on the 3rd person long distance anaphor caki in Korean. Caki typically gets its meaning from an antecedent in the same sentence. It is a dedicated bound variable (Han and Storoshenko 2012), and can be bound by a c-commanding antecedent or a non-c-commanding antecedent (Kim 2000, O’Grady 1987). In one acceptability rating study and two self-paced reading studies, we found processing costs for non-c-commanded caki in comparison to c-commanded caki in sentences that involve covariation as well as in sentences that do not.

It has long been debated whether meaning relations (MR), class of interpretative phenomena that includes bound variable anaphora, distributive readings, and coreference, are licensed by specific c-command configurations. As it turns out, both sides of this debate are correct; there are a multitude of underlying relations that can serve as sources for MR, at least one of which, but not all, relies on c-command. The other, non-c-command-based relations generally rely on semantic and/or pragmatic factors, such as topicality and genericity. A survey of these different MR-sources reveals that, while their interactions are complex, the influence of each can be isolated by applying the appropriate diagnostics and procedures. As such, it is possible to control these sources, and, in particular, to do so in such a way that those sources that do not rely on c-command are suppressed, which creates an environment in which MR-acceptability judgements are robustly informative about the underlying syntactic structure of a given utterance.

This paper aims to explore the well-known preference phenomena in natural languages in terms of the c-command relations. It is found that the use of the two types of antecedents in anaphoric constructions receive a natural account under the proposed C-command Conditions. It is proposed that, the DP which c-commands all the members of the chain of the reflexive is preferred over the DP which c-commands the partial members of the reflexive's chain. This paper further investigates into the phenomenon of non-antecedence of the Chinese monomorphemic reflexive by the object, and has found that it is due to the language-specific parametric properties. This paper then provides a unified account of the preference matter in the anaphoric sentences in terms of the interactions of the proposed Constraints that are actively operative in the human mind.

Many psycholinguistic studies have tested whether pronouns and polarity items elicit additional processing cost when they are not c-commanded. The previous studies claim that the c-command constraint regulates the distribution of relevant syntactic objects. As such, the syntactic effects of the c-command relation are greatly affected by the types of licensing (e.g. quantificational binding) and reading comprehension patterns of subjects (e.g. linguistic illusion). The present study investigates the reading behavior of the language model BERT when the syntactic processing of relational information (i.e. X c-commands Y) is required. Specifically, our two experiments contrasted the BERT comprehension of a c-commanding licensor versus a non-c-commanding licensor with reflexive anaphora and negative polarity items. The analysis based on the information-theoretic measure of surprisal suggests that violations of the c-command constraint are unexpected for BERT representations. We conclude that deep learning models like BERT can learn the syntactic c-command restriction at least with respect to reflexive anaphors and negative polarity items. At the same time, BERT appeared to have some limitations in its flexibility to apply compensatory pragmatic reasoning when a non-c-commanding licensor intruded in the dependency structure.

It is well-known that binding is possible only when the c-command requirement is satisfied: A binds B iff (i) A c-commands B and (ii) A and B are co-indexed. Hornstein (2009), however, proposes that anaphor binding is a product of movement and sideward movement creates a binding relation without c-commanding. However, this paper points out some empirical inadequacies of the proposal and provides an alternative account for the cases in which A appears not to c-command B but A can bind B. This alternative approach is based on the principle that there is a correspondence between thematic hierarchy and syntactic configuration.

N. Kim’s previous studies have shown that properties both of phonology and of syntax play a significant role in defining a P-phrase in Korean. Among the constraints that play major roles in N. Kim’s studies, the constraints OCP(XP) and C-command are structure-sensitive in that they make a judgement on syntactic structures the words of an identical P-phrase can or cannot have. Though these two constraints played major roles in N. Kim’s previous studies, it turns out (i) that the constraint OCP(XP) is no longer necessary and (ii) that the constraint C-command needs to be revised. Eliminating OCP(XP) and making a revision to C-command, this paper aims to simplify and develop the area of prosodic phrasing in Korean phonology.