Prominence and Locality in the Binding of Mandarin Complex Reflexive ‘ta-ziji’ (S/HE-SELF)
汉语复合反身代词约束中的显著性与局部性
Haihua Pan 潘海华; Jianhua Hu 胡建华
Abstract 摘要
This paper shows that the binding properties exhibited by Chinese compound reflexives like ‘ta-ziji’ (s/he-self) can be best explained if an Optimality-Theoretic (OT, Prince & Smolensky 1993) account of reflexivization is adopted. It claims that Prominence and Locality are the two important factors that regulate the interpretation of reflexives in different languages and their different rankings can account for the difference between English and Chinese (PC) in reflexive binding. This paper argues that in Chinese, Prominence Constraint (PC) is ranked higher than Locality Constraint (LC), whereas in English, LC is ranked higher than PC.