Universal laziness of pronouns

Abstract

The goal of the paper is to try to account for an interesting binding phenomenon, namely the fact that pronouns sometimes appear to be bound by universal quantifiers out of islands. Specifically, my claim is that the appearance of binding is an illusion which results from the fact that pronouns can stand for universal quantifiers, i.e. there is a new type of pronouns of laziness. However, the distribution of such pronouns of laziness is highly restricted. These restrictions can be derived by means of Maximize Presupposition principle and situation semantics. The structure of the paper is as follows. In section 1, I illustrate the phenomenon. In section 2, I show that this phenomenon is not a case of real binding but a binding illusion which is made possible by the fact that pronouns can stand for universal quanti?ers like everyone. In sections 3 and 4, I show that there are certain restrictions on the environments in which such a binding illusion is possible. First, it is ruled out in cases where it is in conflict with Maximize Presupposition principle (section 3). Second, it is only possible when the clause containing a quantifier and the clause containing a pronoun in a sense describe the same situation (section 4). In section 5, two readings of illusive binding sentences are discussed and an analysis of how they are derived is proposed. Section 6 concludes the paper.