LINGUIST List 12.3129

Tue Dec 18 2001

Qs: Analogous Proverb, Opionality in Binding

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Johannes Reese, Everything that shines is not gold
2. Florian Schaefer, optionality in binding

Hi all,

I am looking for the idioms that might exist for the English
proverb:

Everything that shines is not gold.

It means: Do not trust the appearance of something, the real value
might be less. The proverb seems to exist at least in all Western
European languages. I have got the following other-language-versions
at hand:


German: Es ist nicht alles Gold, was glaenzt.

French: Tout ce qui brille n'est pas or.

Swedish: Allt som glimmer ~ar inte guld.


Now I am looking for all the other versions that might exist. I want
to ask all of you who are not native speakers of English, German,
French, or Swedish to give me their language's versions of the
proverb, if it exists, or the appropriate proverb if there is some
with the same meaning, or a translation of the above proverb, if there
is nothing like it in your language (please mark that you translated
it yourself). I hope I can cope with other encoding systems.

- 
Regards and thanks in advance

Johannes Reese

Dear linguists,

My first question is about binding in chinese. As everyone knows,
ziji can be long-distance-bound across the subject of a complement
clause. But is ziji really obligatory in this case ? To make it
clear, is a simple pronoun bad in the following example?

(1) Lisi(i) knows [Zhangsan loves self(i)/ him(i)]

I did not find any answer to this question in the literature. But I
know that an anaphor in the subject-position is only optional, as in
the following sentence.

(2) Lisi(i) knows [self(i)/him(i) is the best]

My second question is, if anyone knows a language, which uses an
anaphor in the subject-position (or embedded in the subject-position),
but which allows an anaphor or a pronoun in long-distance-bound
object-position ? To make it clear, the language would look like
this:

(3) A(i) knows [that self(i)/*he(i) is the best]

(4) A(i) knows that [B loves self(i)/him(i)]

 Thank you very much

Florian Schaefer