Constraints on Reflexivization in Mandarin Chinese

Book excerpt: First Published in 1997. Mandarin 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). This book argues for the separation of contrastive and non-contrastive reflexives. This book 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 utterance situations and world knowledge.