Long‐Distance Anaphora: Syntax and Discourse

Abstract

Cross‐linguistically, long‐distance reflexives do not form a unitary phenomenon but come in a variety of subtypes: as long‐distance bound anaphors, as pronominals, or as entities of an intermediate category. This chapter focuses on the first subtype and on Chinese and some other Asian languages: it describes the prominent syntactic and interpretive properties of long‐distance reflexives and addresses theoretical questions about their analysis and typological features and about the role of discourse. The interpretive properties of long‐distance reflexives bear remarkable similarities to those of logophoric pronouns. We clarify the notion of logophoricity as used in African linguistics and in formal semantics and situate a grammatical account of bound‐anaphor long‐distance reflexives that interfaces with notions of logophoricity, attitudes de se, consciousness and perspectivity. The distribution and reference of long‐distance reflexives are subject to syntactic and discourse/pragmatic restrictions that can be quite complex. It is argued, however, that the core patterns observed can be explained through an analysis according to which the property of long‐distance antecedence is only apparent, since both the movement of the long‐distance reflexive to the edge of its local domain and the predication relation between the edge position and the ultimate antecedent are local. We consider some well‐known properties of long‐distance reflexives in Chinese (monomorphemicity, subject orientation, and blocking effects) and explore the way they may follow from grammatical or discourse‐pragmatic principles. We also provide a detailed discussion of the various proposals for the interpretation of long‐distance reflexives, capitalizing on three approaches that make crucial use of a silent operator position on the left edge of the long‐distance reflexive's local domain (a notion along the lines of the traditional governing category). We compare two versions of covert movement (head movement and XP‐movement) in detail, in addition to the alternative of a base‐merged operator position.

The long-distance taziji revisited: experimental evidence for inherent non-local bindings

“…For languages with both monomorphemic and polymorphemic reflexives (e.g., ziji and taziji in Mandarin Chinese), only the monomorphemic one can be long-distance bound while the polymorphemic is claimed to be strictly local (e.g., Huang & Liu 2001). This is also argued to be a universal feature of long-distance reflexives cross-linguistically (e.g., Italian: Giorgi 1984; Norwegian: Hellan 1991; See a review in Charnavel et al 2017). Also, the poly/monomorphemicity distinction in anaphor binding plays a key role in some of the classic syntactic analyses of long-distance reflexives (e.g., Cole et al 1990;Huang & Liu 2001) which proposed that the long-distance reflexive ziji undergoes successive-cyclic local movement in the LF component.…”

Local versus long-distance bound implicit arguments of inalienable relational nouns in Chinese

“…In order to compare KNs with simple reflexives, we examine the syntactic properties in ( 19). see also Charnavel et al 2017 for a comprehensive review). We have already shown the c-command requirement at the beginning of Section 3; below we focus on the three other properties.…”

Covert reflexive argument in inalienable relational nouns

“…We further notice that the relational interpretation of bare body-part RNs is not available if the predicates are "conceptual", such as "believe, understand, know, study, admire". These predicates usually induce one of the logophoric use licensers (Charnavel andZlogar 2015, Rudnev 2017). For example, Rudnev (2017) finds a simple reflexive in Avar, ziw, which is only allowed to be long-distance bound, and argues that it must be a logophor because the matrix predicate must be "a verb of saying, belief, or perception" (attitudinal predicate) to license the logophor in the embedded clause.…”