La teoría del ligamento en la lengua vasca

Laburpena

In this article I apply the Theory of Binding, as formulated by Chomsky in Lectures on Government and Binding (1981), to the data of the Basque Language. This theory admits of various levels of application: I myself have opted for the most orthodox formula, having taken as a starting point the related studies that have previously appeared in Basque writings. I therefore accept as a working hypothesis that Basque is configurational. Put another way: in the structure of the Basque sentence, the Noun Phrase and the Verb Phrase are distinguishable as the basic constituents of the sentence. This matter is known to be at present a topic of debate and source of much discussion among linguists. Altube considered the VP as non-existent, as did De Rijk (at least at the level of Deep Structure). In De Rijk's analysis, the VP appears on the Surface level as the result of a transformational rule). Rebuschi goes further, since he does not admit the existence of the VP at any level. At the opposite extreme lies the well-known work of Patxi Goenaga, whose analysis is based precisely on the hypothesis that in Basque, S can be written as NP VP. The position I hold in this article follows along similar lines, although some aspects are partially modified.
   The article is structured in the following way: I first of all introduce one of the central problems of Basque syntax, a problem which has received fairly superficial treatment from the grammarians of our language. This is the study of distribution of pronouns, nouns and anaphoric elements within the sentence. There follows from this a study of the ways in which different authors have tackled this problem, bearing in mind the fact that only a few partial aspects of it have been examined, and in particular those relating to the so called adnominal anaphors (neure, bere, and the group of reflexive possessives). I also look at some of the implications of the acceptance or non-acceptance of the configurationality of Basque, to conclude that much of the linguistic data can be explained if one applies the Theory of Binding to the Surface Structure. Even so, a slight modification of the concept of Binding prove necessary, so as to introduce the notion of Indirect Binding (Binding through verbal inflection); only in this way can we account for some data that wold otherwise remain unexplained.