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A Beginning Synthesis

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Reflexive Pronouns: A Theoretical and Experimental Synthesis

Part of the book series: Language, Cognition, and Mind ((LCAM,volume 8))

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Abstract

There is a Buddhist story which begins with a Buddhist master and his disciple receiving a guest who talked on a certain topic and the master agreeing with what the guest had said.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The cousins of reflexive pronouns, namely pronouns and r-expressions, are not directly discussed, as such a discussion would go far beyond the scope of this book.

  2. 2.

    This theoretical grounding is itself rooted in Givón’s (1979) original pragmatic versus syntactic communication mode of distinction; see also Givón (2018) for terminological updates.

  3. 3.

    A reviewer notes that we should not forget other languages, such as Icelandic, which show LD binding phenomena (which can be captured syntactically). So it is not claimed that a language showing LD binding is automatically assigned to a pragmatic language group—it is necessary to discover what the mechanisms are behind the LD binding, and also to assess the language on the other factors within the syntactic-pragmatic continuum.

  4. 4.

    I leave aside the assessment of their ‘now-or-never bottleneck’, and how it might be applied to binding. See Christiansen and Chater (2016) for extensive discussion and commentary.

  5. 5.

    Extending Christiansen and Chater’s (2016) idea of Chomsky’s hidden legacy, which discusses the general assumption made by many that there exists a competence-performance distinction, there is another legacy whereby many researchers claim that anaphoric dependencies are purely syntactic in nature. This assumption is certainly challenged here and occasionally acknowledged by proponents of the pure syntax model. For instance, a reviewer’s comment on a pure-syntactic analysis proposed for the Japanese reflexive pronoun zibun by Nishigauchi (2014: 204) prompted the latter to say, “It is certainly true that it is not a priori the case that replacing pragmatic or functional accounts by syntactic ones means progress in science”.

  6. 6.

    It is important to note that reflexivity can be expressed in many different ways (see Faltz (1985) for a survey), and standalone reflexive pronouns are but a subcategory.

  7. 7.

    It should be noted that there is a tight relationship between reflexives and reciprocals in some languages (such as German)—for discussion see Gast and Haas (2008).

  8. 8.

    Siemund (2000) discussed their inclusive/exclusive use, König and Siemund (2000) examined the emphatic and intensifier use, Gast and Siemund (2006) studied the contrastive use. See also Kemmer (1995) for comparisons between reflexive and emphatic –self in English.

  9. 9.

    ‘General’ is the key as this does not hold for all languages. Some languages use ‘head’ or ‘body’ morphemes for the reflexive component (cf. Faltz (1985) for further discussion).

  10. 10.

    It is noted here that this does not make these particular reflexives complex in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. This is discussed further on in Chap. 2.

  11. 11.

    This was previously adopted by Steinbach (2002a).

  12. 12.

    This restriction does not apply to the term ‘anaphora’, which depending on what is discussed, may refer to different groupings (cf. Huang 2000: 2–5).

  13. 13.

    A reviewer points out that this is not necessarily the case across all languages, for example considering binding patterns in Icelandic and Faroese (cf. Reuland 2011).

  14. 14.

    This type of sentence is problematic for the Binding theory, as it assumes that anaphors and pronouns are in complementary distribution (and where a reflexive occurs one will not find a pronoun). In any case, the fact that both forms can have John as their antecedent without any difference in structure occurring suggests a difference in meaning. For example, the perspective taken by the speaker has subtle effects on the pronominal selected (Kuno 1987).

  15. 15.

    See also Charnavel (2019) for further discussion on how logophoricity interacts with non-argument reflexives in English.

  16. 16.

    English does have standalone self available, sometimes used in news headlines, such as Cannibal eats self. Its usage is highly restricted.

  17. 17.

    The only difference would be that taziji is de facto gender-neutral in speech (他), and in writing as well. However, ta also has a feminine form 她.

  18. 18.

    See Huang (2000: 98–99) for data on split antecedence in different languages.

  19. 19.

    Experimentally, word order can be taken advantage of. In the SVO order, once the verb is met, this can lead predictions, but in the SOV order the later occurrence of the verb cannot be relied upon in the same way.

  20. 20.

    This also may appear in adjunct PPs, possessive NPs and emphatic NPs (Huang 2000: 22–23).

  21. 21.

    One problem with discussing finiteness is that languages like Chinese do not overtly display any finiteness distinction, suggesting that it does not exist, which is heavily debated (Hu et al. 2001; Sybesma 2007; Lin 2010; T.-H. J. Lin 2011; Lin 2015; Huang 2018). The possible positions on finiteness in Chinese are that there is no finiteness, finite only, non-finite only, or both (cf. Huang (1994: 40)). Pursuing the assumption that clauses are finite only seems to present the least amount of problems to syntax. See comments from Despić (2015) for TP-less Mandarin Chinese (also applied to Japanese and Korean).

  22. 22.

    See Sect. 2.14 for further discussion regarding Chinese. Japanese also exhibits ‘honorific’ blocking (Huang 2000: 121–122). For blocking effects in English see Sect. 2.11. See also H. Park (2016) for comments on Korean.

  23. 23.

    See Hulk and Cornips (2000), Steinbach (2002b) and Lekakou (2005a) for detailed treatment.

  24. 24.

    The statue and strict/sloppy interpretations in the languages studied here are mentioned in next chapter, but only in a general manner, as interpretations can be affected by structure type and context, requiring an in-depth assessment beyond the scope of this book.

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  1. Department of English, National Central University, Taoyuan City, Taiwan

    Darcy Sperlich

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Sperlich, D. (2020). A Beginning Synthesis. In: Reflexive Pronouns: A Theoretical and Experimental Synthesis. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63875-7_1

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