The Long-Distance Binding of the Chinese Reflexive Ziji

Abstract

The long-distance binding of the anaphors in some languages has been a controversial issue for the past four decades. The binding property of the Chinese reflexive ziji represents one of the challenges in this research field, mainly because of the complicated features of the Chinese, ziji itself and the ambiguous nature of the language. The present study sets out to synthesize the research results of the previous relevant studies from the syntactic and non-syntactic perspectives, trying to figure out their inadequacy. Base on that, the author makes suggestions on resolving the problem of Chinese long-distance binding.