Long-distance anaphors and the blocking effect revisited-An East Asian perspective

A major claim in the literature is that a distribution of anaphoric elements either obeys or disobeys locality conditions. In addition, it has long been noted that the presence of a first (or second) person pronoun intervening between Chinese ziji and a higher potential antecedent blocks long-distance binding. However, this paper proposes that a third person antecedent can be a blocker in a given discourse, based on Kuno and Kaburaki’s (1977) system. If this is on the right track, the blocking effect in East Asian languages, especially Chinese ziji, Korean caki, and Japanese zibun, can be accounted for with a unified treatment.