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Binding theory seeks to explain how different kinds of nominal expressions such as names, noun phrases and pronouns have anaphoric relations amongst one another, and how they come to have reference to things in the world. This textbook provides a thorough and comprehensive introduction to modern binding theory. Starting at a very basic level, it introduces the reader to a huge variety of nominal and especially pronominal expressions from the world's languages, the ways they can be used, and current theorising about their grammatical properties and their interpretation. Daniel Büring discusses a wide range of cross-linguistic data and theoretical approaches, and unlike in existing introductions, pairs the discussion of syntactic facts with a detailed introduction to the semantic interpretation of binding structures. Written in a clear and accessible style, and with numerous exercises and examples, this textbook will be invaluable to graduate and advanced undergraduate students of syntax and semantics.

Speakers can modulate the meaning and effects of their utterances by changing the location of stress or of pauses, and by choosing the melody of their sentences—jointly referred to as Information Structure. Although these factors often do not change the literal meaning of what is said, tools and models to describe these more elusive aspects of linguistic meaning have, in recent years, been developed in formal semantics and pragmatics. This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody—stress, phrasing, and melody—and interpretation—felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. It presents the main phenomena involved, and introduces the details of current formal analyses of prosodic structure, relevant aspects of discourse structure, intonational meaning, and, most importantly, the relations between them. Büring explains and compares the most influential theories in these areas, and outlines the questions that remain open for future research.

This paper proposes a way to encode exhaustivity in clefts as a presupposition, something which has been claimed to be adequate, but never successfully implemented. We furthermore show that the facts that prompted the need for such an analysis carry over to identity sentences with definite DPs and propose a way to achieve the same presuppositions for definite DPs.

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