A study of the Japanese reflexive pronouns, zibun and zibun-zisin

The behavior of various types of anaphors may be classified into two types, local and long-distance anaphors. The English reflexive 'himself' and the Japanese reflexive 'zibun' representatively characterize the two types of anaphors. They contrast in that 'himself' is a local anaphor, whereas 'zibun' is a long-distance anaphor. Japanese has another reflexive pronoun, `zibun-zisin', and it behaves more similarly to himself. The standard binding theory (Chomsky (1981)) regulates the behavior of local anaphors; however, the behavior of long-distance anaphors cannot be explained. One proposal for this matter is to invoke parameterization, which defines a language-specific binding domain for anaphors. Within this analysis, both local and long-distance anaphors are treated under Principle A of the standard binding theory. This thesis will examine the difference in the binding domain between 'zibun' and 'zibun-zisin'. To capture the difference accurately, some peculiar behaviors of 'zibun'/'zibun-zisin' such as backward reflexivization are also investigated with reference to recent linguistic studies.

Name thesis:degree_name

MA

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics

Year dc:date.available

1999

Author dc:creator

• Yamada, Masaru

Contributors dc:contributor

• Michael E. Reider.
• Ahmed Fakhri
• Johan Seynnaeve

• Linguistics

Identifier

https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/767

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchrepository.wvu.edu:etd-1770