In this paper I propose a Binding rule for the identification of pronoun and anaphor referents in phrase-structure trees, assuming the general framework of lhe Government-binding theory outlined by Chom,;ky (1981). The Binding rule, specified by means of an attribute grammar, is a particular instantiation of the Free Indexing rule and binding axioms in Chomsky's Binding theory, with certain empirical and practical advantages. The complexities of the Binding rule proposed, as well as that inherent in Chomsky's Binding theory, are studied, and it i~ shown that the new rule is more psychologically plausible and cornputationally efficient than the original theory on wtfich it is based. The fragment of the attribute grammar shown here is part of an English grammar and parser being developed in tile Prolog and PLNLP languages.

Attribute grammars are an elegant formalization of the augmented context-free grammars characteristic of most current natural language systems. This paper presents an extension of Earley's algorithm to Knuth's attribute grammars, considering the case of S-attributed grammars. For this case, we study the conditions on the underlying base grammar under which the extended algorithm may be guaranteed to terminate. Finite partitioning of attribute domains is proposed to guarantee the termination of the algorithm, without the need for any restrictions on the context-free base.

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The syntactic analysis of languages with respect to Government-binding (GB) grammar is a problem that has received relatively little attention until recently. This paper describes an attribute grammar specification of the Government-binding theory. The paper focuses on the description of the attribution rules responsible for determining antecedent-trace relations in phrase-structure trees, and on some theoretical implications of those rules for the GB model.The specification relies on a transformation-lem variant of Government-binding theory, briefly discussed by Chomsky (1981), in which the rule move-a is replaced by an interpretive rule. Here the interpretive rule is specified by means of attribution rules. The attribute grammar is currently being used to write an English parser which embodies the principles of GB theory. The parsing strategy and attribute evaluation scheme are cursorily described at the end of the paper.

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