Cascadilla Proceedings Project: Paper 1205


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Proceedings of the 24th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by John Alderete, Chung-hye Han, and Alexei Kochetov

ISBN 1-57473-407-5 library binding
vi + 405 pages
publication date: 2005
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA

Table of contents



Abstract

Pranav Anand and Feng-fan Hsieh
Long-distance Reflexives in Perspective
43-51 (complete pdf)

The starting puzzles of this paper are two constraints on long-distance binding in Mandarin out of purpose clauses headed by qu 'go' or lai 'come'. First, long-distance binding is universally impossible out of purpose clauses headed by qu 'go'; this is argued to follow from a clash between the obligatory de se reading of the long-distance anaphor ziji 'self' (Pan 1997) and the impossibility of de se readings within the scope of qu. Second, long-distance binding is possible out of clauses headed by lai 'come' only if the binder is 3rd person. This latter puzzle is argued to be an instance of a more general Disjoint Reference Condition (DRC), which blocks ziji within the scope of lai/qu from being co-referent with lai/qu's "affected entity" hidden variable (an individual that is implicated to be affected by the purposive event within the scope of lai/qu). The DRC is analyzed as an instance of local binding (Heim 1994, Fox 2000), where the more local affected entity must bind ziji when it co-refers with the long-distance antecedent, even though such a configuration violates ziji's subject-orientation. It is demonstrated that the original lai puzzle can be understood as a violation of the DRC, once the empathic perspectival center of the sentence is syntactically represented. Finally, the local-binding account for the DRC is shown to correctly make more general predictions regarding long-distance binding blocking.


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