Abstract:
A research on reference assignment points to two types of discourse-linked and non-discourse-linked referential status. To explain that whether or not the antecedent information previously existed in the discourse, this paper, by presenting testimonies and samples from the Persian language as well as using the Syntax-Discourse Model tries to determine that the reflexive and personal pronouns of Persian in some cases are discourse-linked. First, the paper introduces discourse-linked and non-discourse-linked referential status. Then, by comparing the Syntax-Discourse Model and Chomsky’s Binding Theory, the paper exemplifies cases to show that the Binding Theory is not fruitful at all in explaining them and hence, takes up the principles of the Syntax-Discourse Model to explain and prove them.
Machine summary:
Introduction After Chomsky introduced his Binding Theory, which included three principles for the reference assignment of personal 8, reflexive pronouns, and nouns (Cook and Newson, 1988), linguists have always encountered cases and examples that did not quite match Chomsky's proposed principles 1 reference ssignment 23 diesfceroeurnstiea-ll kteuds 45 Syonn xs-cDoiusrcsoeu-lrisnek o el 67 Bienfdleixnigv Peroornyo ns 8 Pronominals ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ∗ Corresponding author: E-mail: re_no916@stu-mail.
According to Binding Theory, personal and reflexive pronouns are in complementary distribution with respect to a referent; however, encountering contradictory examples in the Persian language always raised the following questions: 1.
We conclude that despite such examples in the Persian language, Chomsky's Binding Theory or other proposed principles that deal only syntactically with the issue of binding of personal and reflexive pronouns cannot correctly account for these violations; for this reason, we must examine these cases more precisely with an approach that also includes discourse considerations; because from a discourse perspective, "reference is a relationship between linguistic elements on one side and non-linguistic experiences of the external world on the other (Hurford, 2007: 26) and the interpretation of pronouns is only possible through a theory that accepts the relationship between language and the external world" (Nazari et al.
Syntax-Discourse Model In the background section, we pointed out that according to Chomsky's binding theory, personal and reflexive pronouns cannot have the same referent and are in a state of complementary distribution relative to each other.
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