Present study investigates whether the syntactic constraints of English reflexives and pronouns originally proposed in Standard Binding Theory (SBT; Chomsky 1980, 1981, 1986) are well-reflected in written corpus data in British English by using the ICE-GB corpus. Four linguistic factors including structural relations between the reflexives/pronouns and their antecedents were used to analyze 1,000 sentences (400 reflexives and 600 pronouns) extracted from the ICE-GB corpus. The results demonstrated the following: i) The linguistic factors related to binding conditions showed structural differences between reflexives and pronouns in English; ii) English reflexives showed more cases of discourse binding (i.e., binding outside the sentential boundary) than the original expectation of SBT; iii) With the domain of sentential binding, structural constraints such as c-commanding and binding domain (Governing Category: SSC and TSC) were nearly violated with reflexives.

Binding Conditions A and B are quite useful generalizations, but they raise many fundamental questions such as 'why must an anaphor be bound within a local domain, but not outside of it?', and 'why does a pronominal obey an almost opposite constraint?' and 'how is the local domain defined?'. This article explores the possibility of providing answers to those fundamental questions by assuming that binding conditions have both lexical and syntactic aspects. I claim that self is a reflexive predicate that requires its two arguments to be co-indexed, whereas a non-reflexive predicate like like requires its two arguments not to be co-indexed.