LONG DISTANCE ANAPHORS An Asian Perspective

A distribution of anaphoric elements roughly like that found in English occurs in languages around the world: There are certain lexical items that occur only with antecedents which ccommand them and which are located in the same local domain (roughly, clause) as the anaphoric elements. In contrast, other anaphoric elements are unable to take c-commanding antecedents within the local domain. The fact that so many genetically unrelated, areally separated and typologically dissimilar languages have anaphoric elements that conform to the same distributional restrictions constitutes convincing support for the view that Binding is determined by principles of universal grammar. While a universalist approach to Binding has a strong foundation in the typology of anaphoric forms, it is also well known that there are many languages in which some forms that can be used as local reflexives can also take antecedents outside their local domain (hereafter, long distance reflexives). For instance in Chinese, the reflexive ziji in (1) can be interpreted as referring to the matrix subject, the intermediate subject or the lowest subject: (1) Zhangsan i renwei Lisi j zhidao Wangwu k xihuan ziji i/j/k Zhangsan think Lisi know Wangwu like sel