A Minimalist Account For Chinese ZIJI

Chinese reflexives arouse a heated discussion among linguists home and abroad. It is mainly because they present a rather different syntactic and pragmatic picture from those that observe the Binding Principles. This thesis adopts what Cheng(2004) suggests, that is, ziji is a compound, but not a monomorphemic pure reflexive. We assume that ziji has the internal structure [DP[DP Zi] D'[D ji], with ji as the head and zi as the specifier, as shown in (1):(1) Internal Structure of zijia. zi:(â…°) [+interpretable]: [Anaphoric](â…±) [-interpretable]: [u-Person]b. ji: (â…°) [+interpretable]: [Pronominal](â…±) [-interpretable]: [u-Person]The current thesis adopts a movement analysis on the Binding Principles. The [Anaphoric] feature determines the clitic zi observing Binding Principle A. It undergoes CliticizationLF that is it adjoins to I(nfl) in its local domain. Thus zi gets adjacent to the specifier of I, which values the unvalued person feature of zi through Feature Copying and checks against the person feature of zi. The [Pronominal] feature ji enables it to observe Binding Principle B and undergo a successive head movement outside its local domain. We assume that the local domain (CP or DP) is not a barrier to ji. After jumping out of the local domain (CP or DP) directly, it adjoins successively to the higher I(nfl)s outside its local domain. The unvalued person feature ofji also gets valued and checked against by the antecedent(s). The person feature of zi and ji must agree with each other because of Spec-head Agreement, or the derivation will crash. Due to the Economy Principle, the binder of zi is preferred if the potential antecedents disagree in person feature. Thus, long-distance binding becomes impossible since ji cannot move across two CPs at a single step. That's the so-called Blocking Effect.