Pronouns and Reflexives Revisited

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to provide an illustration of why a reflexive cannot bind a pronoun. There has been a controversy in theoretical syntax as to why a reflexive cannot bind a pronoun. To answer the question of why caki ‘self’ cannot bind ku ‘he’ in configurations where ku ‘he’ is linked to caki ‘self’, we propose in this paper that a pronoun X cannot be bound to its antecedent Y if a less referential reflexive Z precedes the more referential pronoun X. A consequence of adopting this idea as a condition on binding phenomena is that a more referential pronoun must precede a less referential reflexive. Thus our analysis has the effect of the hierarchy in (i): (i) antecedent ＞ more referential pronoun ＞ less referential reflexive. Also, we argue in this paper that two occurrences of either reflexives or pronouns without an antecedent can both bear the same index. We assume that topic-prominent languages such as Korean allow zero topics that bind the two occurrences of either reflexives or pronouns and that reflexives or pronouns in subject and object positions are variables bound by empty topics. Finally, we demonstrate that the two occurrences of reflexives and pronouns yield the perfect reading and binding phenomena in sentences with reflexives and pronouns in series can be captured properly through linking rather than through coindexing.