A Comparative Study of Reflexive Binding in English and Korean: An OT Approach

A Comparative Study of Reflexive Binding in English and Korean: An OT Approach

The reflexive binding phenomenon is one of the most interesting language phenomena that many scholars have been doing research on. Previous studies on this topic show mainly two directions: one is a syntactic approach, and the other a non-syntactic one. None of these approaches, however, have suggested a successful explanation about the phenomenon. In this paper, I introduce the OT to analyze this phenomenon. Based on the observation of syntactic behaviors of English reflexive pro-self and Korean reflexive caki3), I have introduced some important constraints ranking against each other by which both English and Korean reflexive binding relation has been well explained.