8. PROMINENCE AND LOCALITY IN THE BINDING OF MANDARIN COMPLEX REFLEXIVE ‘TA-ZIJI ’ (SHE-S.pdfVIP

8. PROMINENCE AND LOCALITY IN THE BINDING OF MANDARIN 1 COMPLEX REFLEXIVE ‘TA-ZIJI’ (S/HE-SELF) PAN Haihua City University of Hong Kong HU Jianhua Hunan University ABSTRACT 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 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. 1. INTRODUCTION In the literature, Mandarin complex reflexives are generally assumed to exhibit the same binding properties as their English counterparts (Huang 1983, Huang Tang 1991, Tang 1989, 1994, etc.). However, Pan (1995, 1997, 1998) notes that Mandarin non-contrastive complex reflexive ta-ziji (s/he-self) is not a strict counterpart of the English third person singular reflexive since it is not constrained by an absolute locality condition, given that it (i) can have a long-distance (LD) bound antecedent and (ii) allows sub-command antecedents. Pan also notes that Mandarin complex reflexives observe some kind of blocking effect, which, we believe, can shed some light on our understanding of its relatively local nature in binding. In this paper we show that the binding of Mandarin complex reflex