Problems with Intervention and Binding into Relations

Abstract

In this paper we describe a formal system in which constraints on the interaction of operations involved in creating and supporting operator-variable dependencies during interpretive evaluation match effects of intervention and constraints prohibiting binding into relations that are observed in natural languages. The derived constraints are found to form two sides of the same coin, the one occurring when steps are taken to avoid the other. This formal result is of interest because both types of constraints afflict all forms of operator-variable dependencies in natural languages, suggesting that the wide range of cross-linguistic variation languages exhibit, especially when encoding longer distance dependencies, stems from there being no optimal way to encode operator-variable dependencies.

We would like to thank the participants of LENLS 2009 and the reviewers for the helpful and challenging remarks we received.