Local Obviation as a Relative Phenomenon

In this paper, I explain why local obviation (Condition B of Chomskys binding theory) should be viewed as a relative phenomenon, and establish a correlation between Local Obviation (henceforth LO) effects and the Referential Hierarchy of Korean anaphors proposed in Lee (1997): ku (he) > caki (self) > casin (self) > cakicasin (selfself) = selo (each other). I show that LO characterized as a relative phenomenon may enable us to view Conditions B and C of the binding theory simply as an instantiation of varying degrees of (long distance) disjoint reference effects on the same continuum.