Revisiting anaphor complexity in Japanese

Abstract

Various approaches have been proposed regarding the ways of analyzing anaphors that allow long-distance binding, apparently violating Binding Condition A. A question that needs to be answered by any such analysis is as follows: why do only some anaphors allow long-distance binding? This paper tries to answer this question under a recent approach to long-distance binding (Charnavel 2020a; b; Baker & Ikawa 2024), which I refer to as the null mediator approach, focusing on Japanese data. In Japanese, it is known that morphologically simplex anaphors permit long-distance binding whereas morphologically complex ones do not. I argue that the effect of morphological complexity on the availability of long-distance binding can be readily explained through the null mediator approach, once the internal structure of the anaphors and the Phase Impenetrability Condition from Chomsky (2001) are taken into account. This lends additional credence to the null mediator approach to long-distance binding. I further demonstrate that this proposal makes an accurate typological prediction with regard to the correlation between anaphor complexity and long-distance binding.