This section has discussed some of the salient binding properties of reflexive and referential personal pronouns. Some of the generalizations have been formulated in terms of the notion of anaphoric domain, as in classical binding theory (cf. Chomsky 1981), and we have seen that this theory still provides a satisfactory account of the distribution of referential, complex reflexive, and reciprocal personal pronouns.

Classical binding theory, however, is less adequate to account for the binding behavior of the simplex reflexive zich; cf. Vat (1980). Everaert’s (1986) work, which is probably the most comprehensive survey of the distribution of zich to date, builds crucially on this observation and has inspired much later work. For example, it discusses extensively the relevance of the notion of co-argument, which plays an important role in the influential reflexivity framework (Reinhart & Reuland 1993), according to which the morpheme -zelf is required to mark a verb as reflexive; this immediately predicts that the complex reflexive zichzelf is obligatory when we are dealing with binding between co-arguments. However, we rejected the reflexivity framework because it rests on the questionable claim that complex reflexives in non-argument position are logophors or exempt anaphors, as Reuland (2011:91) calls them; cf. also De Vries (1999:§3.2) and Rooryck & Vanden Wyngaerd (2011:§4.4).

The distribution of zich was described as exhibiting mixed properties in Vat (1980); zich must be free in its local domain, like the referential personal pronouns, but bound within its minimal clause, like the complex anaphor zichzelf; refinements of this proposal can be found in Everaert (1986), Koster (1987), and Broekhuis (1987/1992). An alternative account of the distribution of zich, again based on insights found in Everaert (1986), is that zich is not an anaphor at all, but an unaccusativity marker, an idea that has been further explored by Rooryck & Vanden Wyngaerd (2011) and Broekhuis (2022). The discussion in Section 23.4.2 is largely based on this idea, and claims that the relation between simplex reflexives and their antecedent is not a relation of binding, but one of inalienable possession. If viable, this would mean that the distribution of zich is irrelevant for binding theory, so that some version of classical binding theory based on the notion of anaphoric domain would still suffice to describe the binding behavior of referential and reflexive personal pronouns. This fits perfectly with the linguistic tradition since Chomsky (1981) of unifying the locality constraints on binding, A-movement, and inalienable possession; cf. Chomsky (1981), Guéron (1985), Hornstein (2001), and Grohmann (2003), among others, for earlier proposals. For more detailed information on the so-called inherently reflexive verbs, see Section V2.5.2.

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