Long-distance reflexives and the typology of NPs

Abstract

Introduction Part of the importance of linguistic theories, as well as other scientific theories, is that they tell you which facts are interesting, why they are interesting, and where to look for other interesting facts. The standard binding theory (BT) of Chomsky (1981) has been extremely important in this respect since it has sparked a great deal of cross-linguistic research into the binding properties of pronouns, reflexives, and other NPs, overt and non-overt. As a result, we have learned a lot about the nature of NPs in various languages, what their similarities are and how they differ, both within a given language and cross-linguistically. It is well known that one does not have to look very hard or very far to find, say, reflexives that do not obey the same restrictions as reflexives in English. The socalled long-distance reflexives found in various languages are a case in point (see, e.g., Thráinsson (1976a, c), Napoli (1979), Yang (1983), Hellberg (1984), von Bremen (1984), Giorgi (1984), Maling (1984), Anderson (1986), Rögnvaldsson (1986), Everaert (1986a), Barnes (1984, 1986), Sigurðsson (1986a), Sportiche (1986), Sells (1987), Manzini & Wexler (1987), Wexler & Manzini (1987), Pica (1987), Koster (1987), Kuno (1987), and references cited there). The question is, however, what the existence of such reflexives implies for BT. There are various possibilities, and different suggestions can be found in the literature cited above.

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