| Mandarin reflexive ziji has challenged many syntacticians to probe for its properties and specifically its relationship to Binding Condition A (BCA), which dictates that an anaphor must be bound by a syntactically prominent (or c-commanding) noun phrase in a very local domain (Governing Category or GC). The basic strategy employed in most analyses is to try to show that BCA also applies to ziji, even though ziji apparently violates it by allowing long-distance binding.;Based on the textual search of large corpora on the usage of ziji, ben-ren/shen and their compound forms, this thesis claims that a semantic factor self-ascription and a discourse factor prominence play an essential role in the interpretation of Mandarin reflexives. Following the spirit of Baker (1994), which makes a fundamental distinction between syntactic binding and discourse prominence, this thesis argues for the separation of contrastive and non-contrastive reflexives. While members of the former class--including ben-ren/shen, zishen, stressed ziji and their compound forms--are constrained by discourse prominence, members of the latter class--including unstressed ziji and ta ziji--are constrained by either locality or self-ascription. The thesis further argues that two usages of non-contrastive ziji should be recognized. While the first usage, including ta ziji, is constrained by locality and compatibility conditions, the other usage is regulated by self-ascription; that is, the self-ascription ziji is a de se anaphor, to borrow Lewis' terminology, and thus must be bound to the most prominent self-ascriber.;This thesis will also show that ben-ren/shen and their compound forms, being inherently contrastive, differ from ziji and its compound forms in the contexts accessible to them; the latter can access linguistic contexts only, but the former can also access the situations of utterance and world knowledge. |
