Grammatical roles, Coherence Relations, and the interpretation of pronouns in Chinese

Andrew Simpson,Yan Li,Zoe Wu

doi:10.1186/s40655-016-0011-2

Andrew Simpson, Yan Li + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s40655-016-0011-2

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Abstract

This paper reports on an experimental study of the interpretation of pronouns in Chinese which provides additional support for the proposal in Yang et al. (1999, 2003) that the resolution of pronominal reference in Chinese is more influenced by syntactic information than often assumed in approaches to discourse anaphora in Chinese such as Li and Thompson (1979), Givon (1983), Chen (1986), Christensen (2000), and Pu (2011), where the interpretation of such elements is solely attributed to semantic, pragmatic, and discourse structure-related factors. The paper makes use of a series of sentence completion tasks, adapted from Kehler and Rohde (2013) for Chinese, to try to tease apart the often complex roles played by syntactic position, Coherence Relations, and discourse structure.

Highlights

1 Background This paper reports on an experimental study of the interpretation of pronouns in Chinese which provides additional support for the proposal in Yang et al (1999, 2003) that the resolution of pronominal reference in Chinese is more influenced by syntactic information than often assumed in approaches to discourse anaphora in Chinese such as Li and Thompson (1979), Givon (1983), Chen (1986), Christensen (2000), and Pu (2011), where the interpretation of such elements is solely attributed to semantic, pragmatic, and discourse structure-related factors
7 Further discussion and conclusions The goal of the current experimental study of pronouns in Chinese has been to establish how such elements are interpreted in discourse, focusing on contexts of potential ambiguity with two compatible antecedents, and how the experimental manipulation of various factors might both affect and reveal forces guiding the resolution of pronominal interpretation
Before reviewing the results of the experiments and the potential significance they have for analyzing processes of interpretation with discourse anaphora in Chinese, it is important to emphasize again, as discussed in Section 2, that pronouns constitute an important referential device in Chinese, despite the fact that Chinese is a pro-drop language and permits zero anaphora

Summary

Introduction

This paper reports on an experimental study of the interpretation of pronouns in Chinese which provides additional support for the proposal in Yang et al (1999, 2003) that the resolution of pronominal reference in Chinese is more influenced by syntactic information than often assumed in approaches to discourse anaphora in Chinese such as Li and Thompson (1979), Givon (1983), Chen (1986), Christensen (2000), and Pu (2011), where the interpretation of such elements is solely attributed to semantic, pragmatic, and discourse structure-related factors. Occasion relations could in theory give rise to the subject of the preceding sentence being construed as the topic/focus of the sentence and the antecedent of a subject pronoun in S2, but this was expected to be less of a favored interpretation with TOP sentences than reference to the Goal, as the Goal of a realized TOP verb can be naturally taken to be the focal starting point for a continuation of the discourse.

Results

Conclusion