The Blocking Effect Revisited

In Chinese, the first/second person pronoun can block long-distance reflexive (LDR) ziji to extend its binding domain beyond the clause containing the first/second person pronoun.This is the so-called blocking effect.Such an effect is quite mysterious, for the same effect has rarely been detected in other languages with LDRs.In the literature, many proposals have been provided for its explanation.In this paper, we first point out the problems with these previous proposals, and then give a new account of this phenomenon under our analysis of LD ziji as an anaphor with the empathy requirement (Wang & Pan 2015a, b).Our main claim is that the blocking effect in Chinese is due to the nature of the empathic LD ziji, i.e., the projection of the objective self (Hirose 2002, 2014).It will be shown that this proposal can give a better account of the blocking effect in Chinese.