On The Binding Of Chinese Reflexive Ziji

As one kind of anaphor, Chinese reflexive ziji is so eye-catching for its distinct referential and distributional features, thus gets argued heatedly by different linguists in recent years. Compared with English reflexives, it has not only more freedom in distribution but also allows long-distance binding-ziji can refer to an NP outside of its governing category and be bound by it.Those linguists who study binding phenomenon of ziji can be divided into syntactic group and non-syntactic group. Based on the syntactic and non-syntactic explanations proposed by those linguists, this thesis points out after analyzing and commenting on them that, the nature of ziji should be first discussed before being researched on its long-distance binding. Thus in this thesis the binding features of ziji are finally explained with some examples, on the basis of Cheng's (1999) morphological analysis and with pragmatic and semantic factors, etc. being taken into consideration. This thesis holds that the specific features of ziji are resulted in by the coactions of zi and ji, influenced together by syntactic and non-syntactic (e.g. pragmatic and semantic) factors. Pronominal features of ji enable ziji to be long-distance bound, and under the influences of multiple factors, ziji demonstrates features of subject orientation and blocking effect.This thesis first introduces the object of the study and the framework; then it introduces differences between ziji and English reflexives and the common features of ziji-long-distance binding, subject orientation and blocking effect; the next part goes to the literature review of the analyses on long-distance binding of ziji from syntactic and non-syntactic perspectives, and also the comments on the main studies. Finally in the last part, together with the consideration of non-syntactic factors, a relatively more reasonable account is intended to be achieved.