SYNTACTIC AND NON-SYNTACTIC FACTORS IN REFLEXIVE PRONOUN RESOLUTION IN MANDARIN CHINESE (Lyn et al., 2023)
Citation
Lyn, Jyn., (2023). SYNTACTIC AND NON-SYNTACTIC FACTORS IN REFLEXIVE PRONOUN RESOLUTION IN MANDARIN CHINESE
My thoughts
Summary
The main goal of this dissertation is to use experiments to examine how syntactic factors (e.g., locality, syntactic position) and non-syntactic factors (e.g., verb semantics, perspectival information) impact reflexive resolution in Chinese and how these factors influence real-time processing, to re-examine conventional linguistic judgment and more importantly, to provide new data contributing to the advances of linguistic theories.
The antecedent choice judgment results:
- ziji and ta-ziji are subject to syntactic, semantic, and discourse-level constraints, but the extent to which discourse topic prominence impacts the interpretation of ziji and ta-ziji differs.
- Ziji is more heavily influenced by the discourse topic status of the potential antecedent compared to ta-ziji (ziji is perspective-sensitive (empathic) while ta-ziji is not)
Self-paced reading results
- When discourse-level information is considered in the experimental design, syntax does not play a predominant role in antecedent retrieval
- more consistent with the standard retrieval model (but it can not predict the absence of the object blocking effect)
Abstract
A reflexive pronoun depends on another referent in the discourse for interpretation, and when multiple referents exist, the readers need to identify which referent the reflexive is to be anchored to.
Key Concepts
2 types of reflexive in Chinese
- morphologically simple/bare reflexive ziji (‘self’)
- morphonologically complex/compound ta-ziji (‘s/he-self’)
object blocking effect
- when a 1st person pronoun (sentence-external perspective center) in the object position cannot block long-distance binding by a discourse topic empathy locus (sentence-internal perspective center)
Introduction
- The referent that the reflexive anchors to is called the antecedent; the process of disambiguating the reflexive is called reflexive resolution
- The process of locating the antecedent is constrained not only by the human cognitive architecture but also by the linguistic properties of reflexives, so reflexive resolution is a bridge that brings cognitive architecture and linguistics theories together
- There are in-depth theorizing about the syntactic and discourse-pragmatic constraints that govern the interpretation of Mandarin reflexives (e.g., Pan, 1997, 1998, 2001; Pollard & Xue, 1998, 2001; Huang & Liu, 2001; Anand, 2006; Cole et al., 2006; Huang et al., 2009; Wang & Pan, 2014, 2015a,b; Giblin, 2016; Charnavel et al., 2017), there are relatively few studies examining these theroatical approach from a testable experimental approach (but see e.g., Schumacher et al., 2011; He & Kaiser, 2016; Han, 2020; Liu, 2020)
2 competing antecedent retrieval models debated in the sentence processing literature
- Central question: whether syntactic information is prioritized over non-syntactic information (e.g., gender, number, animacy) in early-stage processing
- the standard cue-based retrieval model (e.g., Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Van Dyke & McElree, 2006; Chen et al., 2012; Jäger et al., 2015; Patil et al., 2016)
- the structure-based retrieval model (e.g., Sturt, 2003; Xiang et al., 2009; Van Dyke & McElree, 2011; Dillon et al., 2013; Cunnings & Sturt, 2014; Parker & Phillips, 2017)
Research Background
- Long-distance binding of ziji
- One key linguistic property of ziji is that it can be exempt from Binding Principle A (Chomsky, 1981, 1986) or the locality constraint
- Binding Principle A: A reflexive must be bound in its local domain (e.g., the smallest XP of the sentence, such as DP, TP, CP that contains a subject and a reflexive)
- Linguistics noted early on that ziji can be free in the local domain and can be referred to a non-local antecedent (e.g., Huang et al., 1984; Battistella, 1989; Tang, 1989; Yu, 1992; Xu, 1993)
- Exempt anaphor: Charnavel (2020) posits that plain (local) anaphors which is bound by overt antecedents, and exempt (long-distance) anaphors which covert logophoric operators bind, are simply bound by different antecedents.
- Earlier syntactic approaches hold that LD ziji is only apparently non-local, but underlyingly locally bound, as ziji moves cyclically at the logical form (LF) to adjoin to a position that has a local relationship to its target antecedent (e.g., Battistella, 1989; Huang & Tang, 1991; Cole et al., 1990, 1993; Cole & Sung, 1994; Cole & Wang, 1996).
- Two analyses, but similar to an agreement-based account
- Head-movement analysis (presented by Cole et al., 1990): ziji moves up the tree to adjoin with the T2 head and percolates its [+3] feature to T2, because T in Chinese is arguably vacuous, after which subject-verb agreement for TP2 can proceed, ziji then moves through all the head positions to the next TP layer to feed subject-verb agreement in TP1.
- XP-adjunction analysis (Huang and Tang, 1991), which is implemented differently but close in spirit.
- 我的想法：这个的确和agreement很像，所以是自己agree with王老师和小明的3-person feature，所以可以refer到两个antecedent，但是感觉这个没有解释为什么这个可以LD bound? 只是说agreement
- 这个local relationship我没有看出来在哪里
- yaqing的解释：ziji本来是base-generate在最下面的NP那里，这时候就是local bound；但是在LF,ziji也可以继续往上move，跑到xiaoming下面的位置的时候，其实也是local bound；但是在LF上的movement我们是看不见的，所以就理解成long-distance bound （如果往上move的话感觉的确可以解释是local bound，理解了）
- Problems with the blocking effect:
- 小明，听说我喜欢自己。vs. 小明，听说你喜欢自己 （自己可以是你，但是不可以是小明, ziji can be referred to you, but not xiaoming）
- blocking effect crashed due to subject-verb agreement
- ziji is generated with a [+1] person feature or gets its phi-feature from the local ‘I’ in TP
- After it moves to TP1 layer and precolates its [+1] feature to T1, subject-verb agreement crashes because the matrix subject has an incompatible [+3] person feature
- 小明告诉我，王教授喜欢自己。vs. 小明告诉你，王教授喜欢自己。（自己可以是你，但是不能是小明, ziji can be referred to you, but not xiaoming）
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This approach predicts an object should not block LD binding, because an object blocker is not in a structural (e.g., subject) position to pass its phi-feature to ziji (showing that there should not be an object blocking effect, which is contrary to 小明告诉我，王教授喜欢自己。vs. 小明告诉你，王教授喜欢自己)
- Recent Approach