Earticle

Establishing the referential dependency between the reflexive pronoun and its antecedent is needed to comprehend the sentence involving the reflexive anaphor. This study investigates how Korean English learners process reflexive pronouns using an offline acceptability judgement task and an online self-paced reading task. The offline task showed Korean learners were very sensitive to the syntactic constraint of the reflexive pronoun. The online task showed evidence of applying binding principle A at the reflexive region and the simultaneous processing of syntactic and semantic information for the referential dependency during reading. The result is consistent with the interactive-processing model that syntax and semantics have influences at the same time on the sentence processing. However, it is notable that syntactic information plays a more important role than semantic information in the processing of reflexive pronouns.

This paper presents a reductionist approach to binding phenomena, which was started in Hornstein (2001). We argue that the binding principle as a grammatical module, for example, like Chomsky’s (1986) definition in (1), should be eliminated along with mysterious concepts like government, and that some binding effects can be dealt with a copy theory of movement in the spirit of minimalism. In particular, it is argued that Principle A effects are A­chain dependency, and that Principle B effects are derived from A'­ or sideward movement chain, followed by A­chain. Thus, the distributional complementarity between anaphors and pronouns can be easily accounted for. This kind of approach to binding phenomena provides us with a new perspective on the pronominal DPs, because they are not lexical items from the numeration, but grammatical formatives from movement operations. In other words, they are morphological allomorphs of a copy of the antecedent, susceptible to universal or language­specific spellout rule.