Reflexivity and Chinese anaphors: a review of Reinhart and Reuland's Reflexivity

Abstract

As a departure from Standard Binding Theory, Reinhart and Reuland (1993) argue that binding is about the reflexive properties and interpretation of predicates. This paper provides a summary of this theory of reflexivity and then applies it to Chinese data. Reinhart and Reuland's Condition A and Bare applied to Chinese anaphors and, in several instances, fail to predict the correct results. The binding conditions are found to be too restrictive for they predict ungrammatical sentences, when in fact, the sentences are grammatical; hence reflexivity fails to capture the full range of reflexivity in Chinese.