The Development of " Long-Distance Anaphora ": A Cross-Linguistic Comparison With Special References to Icelandic

Abstract

The development of lexical anaphors and pronouns and the binding conditions that govern the relationship of these elements to their anteced? ents have been a prominent area of language acquisition research in recent years. There have been numerous experimental studies of binding in the early grammars of English-speaking children (Jakubowicz, 1984; McDaniel, Cairns, & Hsu, 1987; Otsu, 1981; Wexler & Chien, 1985; among others). More recently, there have been a number of studies of children acquiring languages other than English. Of particular interest are those languages with binding properties that are distinct from English, such as Chinese (Chien & Wexler, 1987b), Korean (Lee & Wexler, 1987), and Danish (Jakubowicz & Olsen, 1988). The acquisition studies have proceeded in tandem with research on binding in adult languages. Recent investigation of the binding properties of anaphors and pronouns across a number of different languages strongly suggests that the binding theory (Chomsky, 1981) is a parametrized system (Johnson, 1984; Wexler & Manzini, 1987; Yang, 1984; and others). Although the precise nature of the parametrization is open to some debate, the empirical facts seem to show, among other things, that there are