Antecedents and blockers of long-distance reflexives: The case of Chinese ziji

We examine the seemingly idiosyncratic properties of the Chinese long-distance reflexive ziji when the antecedent for ziji follows the passive morpheme bei or the preverbal object marker ba. These uses of ziji have been taken to be beyond the explanatory power of syntactic accounts of reflexives and might be viewed as contexts in which a discourse account is called for. We argue that this is not the case and that given reasonable assumptions about Chinese phrase structure, a syntactic approach, the head movement analysis, makes precisely the correct predictions about these cases. These correct predictions constitute impressive evidence of the predictive power of the head movement analysis.