Reflexivity without Apparent Marking: The Case of Mashan Zhuang

This paper analyzes the distribution of nominals in Zhuang, a Tai-Kadai language spoken in southwestern China. Zhuang, like many Tai-Kadai and Southeast Asian languages, displays binding phenomena in which pronouns and names can be bound, thus having consequences for the binding theory (e.g. Chomsky 1981, Radford 1997, Reuland 2001, Buring 2005), in particular whether or not these facts of Zhuang violate principles of the classical binding theory. Two main approaches explaining how these facts are aligned with binding theory (e.g. Lasnik 1991 and Lee 2003) are discussed before proposing a functional-predicational approach based on Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) analyses of binding (e.g. Bresnan 2001, Dalrymple 1993) to explain some intricate binding relations in Zhuang.