First person zero anaphor as a cognitive unit in Chinese

Abstract

The Chinese modesty-oriented first person zero anaphora occurs at a very high percentage in the data collected and is hence addressed in this article as a grammaticalizable phenomenon which combines a zero (a phonologically null argument form) appearing in the subject position with “modesty” and “shyness” semantic specifications as part of the Chinese “self-denigration and respect for others” ideology. Conventional approaches to anaphora such as anaphoric binding, topical continuity, and processing effort economy cannot properly account for such an unusual discourse phenomenon. Therefore a cognitive grammatical framework, assuming the fossilization of sufficient accessibility of the zero to the grammatical knowledge structure as the mental context, is proposed in this article. This approach explains the phenomenon as resulting from some multi-constraints at the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and socio-psychological representational levels.