A Comparative Study of Reflexive Binding in English and Chinese = An OT Approach

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The binding theory(Chomsky 1981) has been considered to be one of the most important theories which is used to deal with the legal domain especially of reflexive binding. The purpose of this paper is to find out if the binding theory can work for all English reflexive situations, and if it can also be used for other languages such as Chinese. I showed some English & Chinese data which can not be properly explained by the original binding theory, and I modified and added some other constraints to analyze and compare English and Chinese case of reflexive binding.
After some data analysis, I showed some of English and Chinese reflexive sentences can be dealt with the binding theory, but some others can not. Based on these unexplicable data, I added the rule of Lager Domain Prefer (LDP) constraint which is introduced by Moon(1995) to analyze both English and Chinese reflexive sentences. The constraint hierarchy of BBC>>LDP is for English and constraint hierarchy of BBC<<>>LDP is for Chinese. However there still exist some defects, so after further data analysis, a new constrain of Domain Change based on Verbal Types(DCVT) has been introduced to analyze unexplainable Chinese sentences. Finally, depending on this new constraints hierarchy- BBC<<>>LDP>>DCVT, Chinese reflexive sentences have been explained successfully.
In conclusion, by using OT evaluation the relations between English and Chinese reflexive sentence have been shown clearly.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. Introduction
• Ⅱ. New rule exploration
• Ⅲ. Introduction of OT
• Ⅳ. Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Abstract