Whether or not multiple occurrences of ziji can take distinct antecedents: A deictic perspective

•Multiple zijis in a single clause are shown to take one and the same antecedent.•The so-called blocking effect induced by a third-person NP is proved not to exist.•The Perspective-Center determines that all zijis should be bound by the same antecedent.

It has been claimed in the theoretical linguistic literature (Pan, 1997 and Huang et al., 2009) that (i) the Chinese reflexive ziji ‘self’, if occurring more than once in a single clause, can take separate antecedents, and (ii) a third-person NP can block the long-distance binding of ziji. On the basis of corpus data, this paper investigates the claim, demonstrating that it is neither empirically possible nor cognitively plausible for multiple zijis in a single clause to have distinct referents, and the so-called blocking effect induced by a third-person NP is unlikely to exist. It is shown that the perspective center is determined relative to the communicative context, which in turn determines the linear order of sentence structure containing multiple zijis. Precisely, the first ziji's reference determines the rest of zijis’ reference(s).