The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.
|
Language units large and small
Marked forms of words - Inflection, Derivation, Declension, Conjugation · Diminutive, Augmentative
Groups and categories and properties of words - Syntactic and lexical categories · Grammatical cases · Correlatives · Expletives · Adjuncts
Words and meaning -
Morphology ·
Lexicology ·
Semiotics ·
Onomasiology
· Figures of speech, expressions, phraseology, etc. · Word similarity ·
Ambiguity ·
Modality ·
Segment function, interaction, reference - Clitics · Apposition· Parataxis, Hypotaxis· Attributive· Binding · Coordinations · Word and concept reference
Sentence structure and style - Agreement · Ellipsis· Hedging
Phonology - Articulation · Formants· Prosody · Sound change · Intonation, stress, focus · Diphones · Intervocalic · Glottal stop · Vowel_diagrams · Elision · Ablaut_and_umlaut · Phonics
Analyses, models, software - Minimal pairs · Concordances · Linguistics software · Some_relatively_basic_text_processing · Word embeddings · Semantic similarity
Unsorted - Contextualism ·
· Text summarization ·
Accent, Dialect, Language · Pidgin, Creole · Natural language typology ·
Writing_systems · Typography, orthography ·
Digraphs, ligatures, dipthongs ·
More linguistic terms and descriptions ·
|
✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.
Binding refers to assigning something that was previously open to many options.
See
- free variables in math
- variable binding in programming, etc.
- specific meanings in linguistics (related to coreference resolution)
In linguistics it often refers to the binding of bound morphemes, bound roots, bound stems.
You could also see sentences as having unbound variables in things like pronouns and other forms of reference.
Referent resolution is often required for binding, and referent resolution may itself require pragmatics, common sense, and such.
Pronouns are often unbound. In Jane found his book, his probably is probably an endophoric anaphora, probably referring to some/the recently mentioned man.
Agreement plays a role too -- consider that in Jane found her book, the book could be her own, or another woman's.
Note that reflexive pronouns and reciprocal pronouns are bound. For example, in I hurt myself, the object is bound to the subject, by the reflexive 'myself'.
You could argue that the reflexive reference can be bound to an unbound reference. Consider They hurt each other: it is clear that the group did something among themselves, but not what that group refers to.
See also