Chinese Reflexives

Book excerpt: This book presents the Chinese reflexivisation system, investigating the different types of Chinese reflexive constructions and offering an analysis of these, in an attempt to integrate syntactic, morphological and discourse-related aspects of the phenomena. In Chinese, two distinct types of reflexive have been widely discussed in the literature: simplex reflexive ziji "self", which is a long-distance reflexive, and complex reflexive pronoun + ziji, such as taziji "himself", which must be locally bound. In addition, Chinese has a kind of double reflexive construction, such as ziji-benshen, and reflexive clitics zi "self" and ziwo "self". This book argues that reflexive clitics must be locally bound; and that under certain conditions, both simplex reflexive ziji and complex reflexives can be locally bound, long-distance bound, or even free in an entire sentence. This study proposes that every type of reflexive has two structures: one is an anaphoric structure, while the other is a logophoric structure. When a verb assigns an anaphoric theta role, the reflexive can have the anaphoric structure and the head of the reflexive NP is allowed to adjoin the head of the VP at LF. If a reflexive cannot receive an anaphoric theta role, it can have a logophoric structure. In the logophoric structure, the head of the reflexive DP must be a pro in order to receive the disjoint theta role from the verb.