Abstract
This paper argues that inalienable relational nouns in Mandarin Chinese, specifically kinship nouns (KNs, e.g. father, sister) and body-part nouns (BPNs, e.g. head, face), have an implicit reflexive argument. Based on a syntactic comparison between KNs, BPNs, locally and long-distance bound reflexives, we argue that the implicit reflexive arguments of BPNs must be locally bound, whereas that of KNs can either be locally or long-distance bound. We conclude that these two types of implicit arguments in Mandarin Chinese correspond to locally and long-distance bound reflexives, respectively. We analyze this difference in connection with binding theory and a theory of logophoricity. We argue that the implicit argument of BPNs is a locally bound anaphor and cannot be used as a logophor, whereas that of KNs can, supporting a proposal that the logophoric property leads to long-distance binding, as argued by Huang & Liu’s (2001) for reflexives in Mandarin Chinese.
Highlights
In Mandarin Chinese (Chinese), INALIENABLE RELATIONAL NOUNS, including KINSHIP NOUNS (KNs, e.g. father, aunt) and BODY PART NOUNS (BPNs, e.g. head, face), can generally occur as bare nouns without an overt possessor
If we assume that bare inalienable RNs such as KNs and BPNs have an implicit argument – a widely held assumption ( Partee 1983/1997, Barker 1995, Vikner & Jensen 2002, Partee & Borschev 2003, Zhang 2009) – several questions arise and we address them in this paper: What is the syntactic nature of this implicit argument in Mandarin Chinese? Is it a reflexive or a non-reflexive pronoun regarding its binding properties, considering how it relates to a particular antecedent and not others in different instances including (2)? do KNs and BPNs bear the same type of implicit argument?
We have a possible answer to that criticism: our results show that there are two types of implicit arguments, undermining the proposal of a unified control PRO approach to them, especially considering that there is no precise counterpart in the typology of PRO to the distinction we observe here between local binding and long-distance/logophoric binding for BPNs and KNs
Summary
In Mandarin Chinese (Chinese), INALIENABLE RELATIONAL NOUNS ( inalienable RNs), including KINSHIP NOUNS (KNs, e.g. father, aunt) and BODY PART NOUNS (BPNs, e.g. head, face), can generally occur as bare nouns without an overt possessor. A reasonable hypothesis is that inalienable RNs have a pronominal argument which refers to the possessor This hypothesis is intuitive because when the possessor of an RN is overtly realized in examples parallel to (2), it is usually a possessive pronoun, as it is the case in the English counterpart (1). This paper provides evidence that the implicit argument of inalienable RNs must be a syntactically projected reflexive rather than a non-reflexive pronoun. We will provide evidence that the long-distance bound implicit argument of KNs shows logophoric properties.
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