Deletion and variable binding

Summary

Introduction

It is generally agreed that pronominalization and deletion under identity are closely related phenomena; Postal (1970) and Jackendoff (1972) have made particularly striking cases for the existence of close formal similarities among pronominalization, reflexivization, and coreferential complement subject deletion. Their claims are quite similar in spite of the differences between the generative and interpretive semantics frameworks, and both are concerned with complement subject deletion not only when it is controlled by the next higher verb, i.e. ordinary Equi-NP Deletion, but also when its ‘controller’ is several clauses away, i.e. what Grinder (1970) analysed as ‘Super-Equi NP Deletion’. What I want to explore in this paper is the relation between pronominalization and deletion in the ‘Super-Equi NP Deletion’ cases, as illustrated by (1) and (2).

1. John_i thought it was foolish to shave himself_i

2. John_i thought it was foolish for him_i to shave himself_i

I am going to argue that (1) and (2) are not simply optional surface variants, but that their similarity rather results from an accidental convergence of quite disparate processes. If my argument is correct, then on a generative semantics approach (1) and (2) should have distinct underlying representations and on an interpretive approach their semantic interpretations should be arrived at by distinct interpretive principles, even though for this particular pair of examples there may be semantic rules which would show the two sentences to be logically equivalent.