Abstract
This article explores a restriction on non-local binding in Vietnamese—the blocking effect—including a systematic comparison with its Mandarin Chinese counterpart. Our finding is that the blocking effect in Vietnamese appeared to be rather different from that in Mandarin but, in fact, employs essentially the same syntactic mechanism. While binding of Mandarin ziji is governed by a [+participant] feature, binding of the Vietnamese anaphor mình is governed by a [+author] feature. Together with the assumption of the presence of a silent performative frame, this derives that binding of Vietnamese mình yields what one may call an Author effect.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 153-189 |
| Number of pages | 37 |
| Journal | Journal of East Asian Linguistics |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 20 Nov 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2023, The Author(s).
Funding
We would like to express our gratitude to the two reviewers and the editor of the Journal of East Asian Linguistics for their constructive and valuable comments, which have significantly improved the quality and clarity of our manuscript. We are also grateful to Iain Giblin for his helpful comments on an earlier version and to our informants who provided us with their grammaticality judgments. The research reported in this article was made possible by a grant from Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training (911 Project) and the Stichting Taaltechnologie in Utrecht.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Stichting Taaltechnologie in Utrecht | |
| Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training |
Keywords
- Author effect
- Blocking effect
- Goal
- Mandarin
- Multiple agree
- Non-local binding
- Probe
- The author feature
- The participant feature
- The performative frame