Unpacking the blocking effect: Syntactic prominence and perspective-taking in antecedent retrieval in Mandarin Chinese

Elsi Kaiser,Jun Lyu

doi:10.16995/glossa.5781

Abstract

In the linguistics literature, it is generally agreed that the non-local use of the bare reflexive ziji in Mandarin Chinese is sensitive to perspective centers. The introduction of a local first-person pronoun encoding the comprehender’s perspective is assumed to make non-local binding unavailable, a phenomenon called the blocking effect. We conducted two sets of offline and online experiments that examine the blocking effect associated with ziji, to better understand whether and how it is affected by the syntactic status of the blocking pronoun (subject vs. object). By comparing the forced-choice judgment results in Experiments 1 and 2, we find that syntactically prominent subject blockers lead to stronger blocking compared to object blockers, and that the strength of the blocking effect can be modulated by verb semantics. Furthermore, only subject blockers caused blocking during incremental real-time processing; object blockers did not. These experimental results have implications for both the linguistic formulation of the blocking effect and for sentence processing models.

Highlights

Humans can comprehend anaphoric expressions, including reflexives, rapidly on the fly
The results revealed that antecedent retrieval is sensitive to discourse-level cues: the reading time differences between the self-directed and otherdirected verb conditions in the non-blocker conditions signal that participants attempted to bind ziji to the discourse topic, the internal point of view (POV) center
As in Experiment 1a, a verb bias effect emerged between the two blocker conditions as well: other-directed verbs lead to a decreased tendency for local binding compared to self-directed verbs (31% vs. 62%, β = –1.53, SE = 0.21, t = –7.35, p < 0.001)

Summary

Introduction

Humans can comprehend anaphoric expressions, including reflexives, rapidly on the fly. This is no easy accomplishment since anaphoric expressions are referentially underspecified. In a sentence like “Mary said that John scolded himself”, a comprehender needs to track the potential antecedents of the reflexive himself and recruit semantic (e.g. gender), syntactic (e.g. structural position), and discourse-level (e.g. topicality) cues to guide antecedent retrieval. We ask how linguistic cues at the syntactic and discourse-pragmatic levels constrain real-time antecedent retrieval, with a specific focus on the Chinese bare reflexive ziji, motivated by additional linguistic interests. It was soon realized that semantic and discourse-pragmatic factors need to be considered to account for cases like (1) (Kuno 1987: 127) where the reflexive can be bound non-locally

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Discussion

Conclusion