Local Binding without Coargumenthood: Norwegian Noun Phrases

Coargumenthood has been a central concept in binding theory both in Lexical Functional Grammar and other frameworks. Binding is then basically a relation between arguments of the same predicate (see for example Hellan 1988, Dalrymple 1993, Reinhart and Reuland 1993, Pollard and Sag 1994, Bresnan 2001, Safir 2004). Coargumenthood has also been claimed to be decisive to binding in noun phrases. This paper shows that this is not correct for Norwegian noun phrases, which turn out to give new arguments against the coargument theory. Based mainly upon examples from texts, it is shown that a possessive can bind a reflexive without the requirement that the possessive or the reflexive is (part of) an argument of the noun. It is also shown that the distribution of simple and complex reflexives in noun phrases is different from what has been claimed, and that their distribution is incompatible with their traditional analysis in Hellan 1988.