Closeness, Prominence, and Binding Theory

The relationship between a reeexive and its antecedent is characterized by (a) a locality condition, and (b) a syntactic prominence condition. In Chomsky (1981) locality is deened in terms of governing category, and syntactic prominence is via c-command. In this article I show that, to account for the long-distance binding properties of complex reeexive ta-zijì3s-slef' in Chinese, which cast doubts on the so-called Pica's generalization that only morphological simplex reeexives can be long-distance bound, locality should be regulated by a closeness condition, so locality is considered as a relative rather than a strict condition. I propose that the prominence condition should be deened in terms of animacy hierarchy for Chinese reeexive ta-ziji. Thus, the interpretation of reeexives can be uniied not under Chomsky's Binding Condition A, but under the Anaphor Condition proposed in this article, which is deened in terms of closeness and prominence. It is suggested that languages diier only in their deenitions of prominence.