Vietnamese Anaphora: Binding Principles and the Lack Thereof

Abstract

Vietnamese poses a challenge for both classic and competition-based accounts of the Binding Theory. While, at first glance, Vietnamese seems not to be subject to any of the classic Binding Principles, we discuss each of the conditions and argue that Vietnamese still fits within the realm of cross-linguistic patterns. We also present novel data that illustrate context-dependent competition based accounts fare better in capturing coreferent readings of personal pronouns.