Closeness, prominence, and binding theory

The relationship between a reflexive and its antecedent is characterized by (a) a locality condition, and (b) a syntactic prominence condition. In Chomsky (1981) locality is defined in terms of governing category, and syntactic prominence is via c-command. In this article I show that, to account for the long-distance binding properties of complex reflexive ta-ziji '3s-self' in Chinese, properties which cast doubt on 'Pica's generalization' that only morphologically simplex reflexives can be long-distance bound, locality should be regulated by a closeness condition. Locality is thus considered a relative rather than a strict condition. I propose that the prominence condition should be defined in terms of animacy hierarchy for Chinese reflexive ta-ziji. Thus, the interpretation of reflexives is unified not under Chomsky's Binding Condition A, but under the Anaphor Condition proposed in this article, which is defined in terms of closeness and prominence. It is suggested that languages differ only in their definitions of prominence. © 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. © Kluwer Academic Publishers.