Vietnamese <i>mình</i>

Abstract This paper has four goals. (1) We argue that the non-local antecedent of the long-distance reflexive mình is either an attitude holder bearing a de se belief, or an empathy locus in the event/state that the utterance speaker identifies with ( Kuno &amp; Kaburaki 1977 ; Kuno 1987 ; Huang &amp; Liu 2001 ; Wang &amp; Pan 2015 ; Charnavel 2019b ). (2) We show that Huang &amp; Liu’s (2001) analysis based on direct discourse representations fares better than the generalized discourse requirement in Cole et al. (2006) to characterize the distribution of the blocking effect of mình because first/second-person pronouns induce blocking only when they occur within the relevant direct discourse representation for the intended long-distance interpretation of mình . (3) We propose that the blocking effect of mình can be lifted with proper contextual support, invoking the Topic Empathy Hierarchy ( Kuno &amp; Kaburaki 1977 ; Kuno 1987 ) to override the Speech-Act Empathy Hierarchy and neutralize the perspective conflicts induced by a first/second-person pronoun. (4) We posit that the dependency between mình and its non-local antecedent is mediated by an implicit logophoric operator/pronoun in Charnavel’s (2019b) two-stage model of binding of long-distance anaphora ( Nishigauchi 2014 ; Sundaresan 2018 ; Ikawa 2024 ; Baker &amp; Ikawa 2024 ). We show that the existence of the implicit logophoric operator/pronoun not only captures the hybrid syntactico-pragmatic properties of Vietnamese mình , but also plays a pivotal role in explicating the interpretative possibilities of multiple occurrences of mình .