Chinese Pronoun Research Articles

To stress or not to stress: what can Mandarin pronouns inform us of the accessibility of topic and focus?

Referents with a topical or focused status have been shown to be preferable antecedents in real-time resolution of pronouns. However, it remains unclear regarding whether topicality and focus compete for prominence when co-present in the same narrative, and if so, how differential prominence affects prosodic realization of a subsequent pronoun. Building upon the general understanding that stress on pronouns signals an unusual, less accessible interpretation, we take advantage of the conditional bi-clausal construction in conjunction with homophonic 3rd person pronouns in Chinese. We manipulated the information status of two referents that were introduced into a six-clause narrative in succession, specifically (i) Topic and (ii) Focus, and also (iii) the Reference of the Pronoun (either the first or second referent). Our acoustic analyses showed that pronouns were produced with higher F0s when the first referent was topicalized than when it was not topicalized under conditions where the second referent was focused. Pronouns referring back to the first referent were uttered longer when the referent was not topicalized than when it was topicalized. These results suggest accessibility statuses of referents vary dynamically in response to different prominence-lending cues, and these variations can be captured by the prosodic features of a following pronoun.

Respectfulness-processing revisited: An ERP study of Chinese sentence reading.

In Mandarin Chinese, an important manifestation of respectfulness is the use of different forms of second-person pronouns. Jiang et al. (2013) examined the event-related potential (ERP) correlates of processing respectful and plain pronouns in Chinese. However, this study suffered from a few methodological limitations, which restricted both the reliability and functional interpretations of the study's findings. In the present study, we resolved these limitations and further investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms of processing the respectfulness of pronouns. In the present study, participants read 160 critical Chinese sentences with a second-person pronoun (ni or nin) that was either consistent or inconsistent with its prior sentence context in terms of respectfulness, as well as 240 filler sentences. Unlike the previous study that reported a 300-500 ms negative response (N400) for both types of inconsistent pronouns, a sustained positive response for Nin inconsistent and a sustained negativity response for Ni inconsistent in the late time window, the present study found an N400 response and late sustained negativity for Nin inconsistent, but not for Ni inconsistent. Furthermore, the cluster-based permutation showed a significant negative cluster for Nin inconsistent, extending from 432-622 ms. We related this negative response for Nin inconsistent with recent accounts of the N400 and late negativity. Finally, the absence of the ERP effect for the Ni condition was linked to the role of the pragmatic property of Ni.

The interpretational preferences of null and overt pronouns in Chinese

We report three reading comprehension experiments investigating the interpretational preferences and processing ofproand overt pronouns in Chinese, a ‘discourse-oriented’pro-drop language (Huang 1984). Our offline rating experiments showed that bothproand overt pronouns were subject-based, but the preference for the subject antecedents was stronger withprothan with overt pronouns. In addition, these different levels of subject biases were confirmed in a self-paced reading experiment; a processing penalty was incurred with object antecedent interpretation regardless of the pronominal type, but the penalty was bigger forprothan for overt pronouns. These experimental results are consistent with Accessibility theory that less specific anaphoric expressions (e.g.pro) were less likely than more specific anaphoric expressions (e.g. overt pronouns) to refer to a less prominent antecedent (e.g. syntactic object).

An EEG Analysis of Honorification in Japanese: Human Hierarchical Relationships Coded in Language.

This study examines the neural substrate of the understanding of human relationships in verbal communication with Japanese honorific sentences as experimental materials. We manipulated two types of Japanese verbs specifically used to represent respect for others, i.e., exalted and humble verbs, which represent respect for the person in the subject and the person in the object, respectively. We visually presented appropriate and anomalous sentences containing the two types of verbs and analyzed the electroencephalogram elicited by the verbs. We observed significant parietal negativity at a latency of approximately 400 ms for anomalous verbs compared with appropriate verbs. This parietal negativity could be a manifestation of the pragmatic process used to integrate the linguistic forms with the human relationships represented in the sentences. The topographies of these event-related potentials (ERPs) corresponded well with those of ERPs for two second-person pronouns in Chinese (plain ni and respectful nin). This correspondence suggests that the pragmatic integration process in honorific expressions is cross-linguistically common in part. Furthermore, we assessed the source localization by means of independent component (IC) analysis and dipole fitting and observed a significant difference in ERP between the honorific and control sentences in the IC cluster centered in the precentral gyrus and in the cluster centered in the medial part of the occipital lobe, which corresponded well with the functional magnetic resonance imaging findings for Japanese honorification. We also found several significant differences in the time-frequency analyses for the medial occipital cluster. These significant differences in the medial occipital cluster suggested that the circuit of the theory of mind was involved in the processing of Japanese honorification. Our results suggest that pragmatic and syntactic processing are performed in parallel because the person to be respected must fulfill the grammatical function appropriate for the honorific verb.

Discussion on Textual Equivalence—Mona Baker’s In Other Words: A Course Book on Translation

In Other Words: A Course Book on Translation aims to provide a basis for guiding translators. The abundant examples and detailed explanations make the book easy to be perceived. However, Baker comments that in Chinese pronouns are hardly used and once a participant is introduced, continuity of reference is signalled by omitting the following subjects of following clauses. By qualitative analysis, this paper finds that although Chinese has a tendency to use fewer pronouns than English, the cases it uses pronoun are not that rare.

Classical Chinese pronouns: Pragmatic implications and politeness

Classical Chinese pronouns: Pragmatic implications and politeness

A Corpus-Based Investigation of the Distributional Patterns of English and Chinese Pronouns

A Corpus-Based Investigation of the Distributional Patterns of English and Chinese Pronouns

Recounting and reflecting: The use of first person pronouns in Chinese, Greek and British students' assignments in engineering

Chinese and Greek students are among the many international groups now studying at UK universities. While the written English of these groups has been extensively explored through the short argumentative essays comprising learner corpora, little research has been conducted on their assessed writing at undergraduate and Masters level. This paper reports on a study of Chinese, Greek and British student writing within the discipline of Engineering in five UK universities. Data is extracted primarily from the 6.5 million-word British Academic Written English corpus, supplemented by assignments from additional UK universities. The main aim of the study is to explore texts from students with different L1s and cultural backgrounds but within the same discipline and current educational system. First person pronouns were selected as a contained aspect of student writing for comparison, since these are a highly visible feature of a writer's identity construction (e.g. Hyland, 2002b), yet it is often claimed that L2 English students ‘over use’ these pronouns to the detriment of their writing (Lee & Chen, 2009). Findings indicate that the Chinese and Greek students make greater use of we in their writing within Engineering than British students and the paper explores the various functions of both we and I.

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

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.

Comprehending pronouns in Chinese: evidence for cross-language differences in referential processing

The research investigated the extent to which pronoun comprehension occurs differently for readers of Chinese (Mandarin) and English. We report experiments in which Chinese readers processed conditions similar to those tested previously in English. In Experiment 1, participants provided intuitive judgments of co-reference. In Experiment 2, additional participants comprehended sentences as reading time was measured. In both experiments, all sentences were composed of two clauses. One clause contained a male or female noun phrase (NP); the other, contained one of three types of pronouns: a) 他ta or he; b) 她 ta she; or c) a zero pronoun. Participants' intuitive judgment revealed that in Chinese, as in English, pronouns and NPs of the same gender were interpreted as co-referent most of the time (i.e., over 70%). Results indicated that pronouns following NPs (i.e., anaphoric pronouns) were processed similarly in Chinese and in English. Pronouns preceding NPs (i.e., cataphoric pronouns) were processed differently in Chinese than in English. Zero cataphoric pronouns were more difficult to process than zero anaphoric pronouns. Implications for universal versus language-specific processing strategies are discussed.

Chinese Overt Pronoun Resolution: A Bilingual Approach

Much research has been done on the problem of English pronoun resolution, but there has been relatively little work on the corresponding problem of Chinese pronoun resolution. While pronoun resolution in both languages remains a challenging task, Chinese pronoun resolution is further complicated by (1) the lack of publicly available Chinese word lists or dictionaries that can be used to look up essential mention attributes such as gender and number; and (2) the relative dearth of Chinese coreference-annotated data. Existing approaches to Chinese pronoun resolution are monolingual, training and testing a pronoun resolver on Chinese data. In contrast, we propose a bilingual approach to Chinese pronoun resolution, aiming to improve the resolution of Chinese pronouns by leveraging the publicly available English dictionaries and coreference annotations. Experiments on the OntoNotes 5.0 corpus demonstrate that our bilingual approach to Chinese pronoun resolution significantly surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art monolingual approaches.

Processing biological gender and number information during Chinese pronoun resolution: ERP evidence for functional differentiation

There have been a number of behavioral and neural studies on the processing of syntactic gender and number agreement information, marked by different morpho-syntactic features during sentence comprehension. By using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, the present study investigated whether the processing of semantic gender information and the processing of notional number information can be differentiated and to what extent they might interact during Chinese pronoun resolution. The pronoun (with singular form in Experiment 1 and with plural form in Experiment 2) in a sentence matched its antecedent or mismatched it with respect to either biological gender or notional number or both. While the number mismatch elicited a P600 effect starting from 550ms (for singular pronoun) or 400ms (for plural pronoun) post-onset of the pronoun, the gender mismatch elicited an earlier (for singular) and larger (for both singular and plural) P600 effect. More importantly, the double mismatch produced a P600 effect identical to the effect elicited by the single gender mismatch. These results demonstrate that biological gender information and notional number information are processed differentially and have different processing priorities during Chinese pronoun resolution.

A Pragmatic Account of Anaphora: The Cases of the Bare Reflexive in Chinese*

Most, if not all, of the existing research on anaphoric constructions containing the bare reflexive ‘ziji’ in Chinese has been done on a formalist basis and some found in the literature has as it were not given a cogent explanation. The present article, largely based on some discourse and/or pragmatic principles and following a close examination of data drawn from various texts, describes and analyzes its anaphoric uses in two domains: the local and the long-range. The findings suggest that in either case, this bare or simplex reflexive occurs, anaphorically, much more frequently than an alternate complex reflexive or a plain pronoun, which results from the fact that it serves a twofold role, as an alternative to a complex reflexive, on one hand, to minimalize communicative reference and to a pronoun, on the other, to save time for discourse understanding. Such anaphora facts are regulated by a neo-Gricean-like pragmatic principle re the uses of third-person pronouns in Chinese: (a) where the grammar permits the occurrence of both a bare and a complex reflexive, the speaker intending locally bound anaphora tends to use the bare to produce the minimal linguistic information enough to achieve the communicational ends, unless motivated otherwise; (b) where the context permits the occurrence of both a bare reflexive and a pronoun, the speaker intending long-range coreference tends to use the bare reflexive to ease discourse interpretation, unless prevented doing so by other considerations.

Effects of antecedent order and semantic context on Chinese pronoun resolution

Three reading time experiments were conducted in order to examine the relative contributions of order of antecedents and semantic context to the resolution of temporarily ambiguous Chinese pronouns. These pronouns were ambiguous because each of them was preceded by two antecedents, both of which were likely candidates for coreference. The identity of the pronoun was revealed by subsequent disambiguating information that constrained the pronoun to one particular interpretation. Experiment 1 showed that reading of the disambiguating phrase was slower when the phrase confined the pronoun to the second rather than to the first antecedent. Experiment 2 produced the same effect of antecedent order (first vs. second antecedent) regardless of whether the target antecedent was an action-performing or an action-receiving entity. In Experiment 3, the order effect was eliminated by a biasing modifier inserted immediately before the pronoun. These results indicate that in a semantically neutral environment, the first-appearing antecedent is the preferred candidate for coreferencing the ambiguous Chinese pronoun. The interaction between order of antecedents and semantic context (in the form of preposed biasing modifiers) suggests that the initial comprehension of Chinese pronouns depends as much on contextual as on structural factors.

The implications of mismatched personal pronouns in Chinese

This article examines the phenomenon of variation of number in Chinese pronouns. The data used for analysis is the eighteenth-century classic Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng Dream of the Red Chamber'. Research on Indo-European pronouns has shown that variation of number is the most widespread phenomenon employed to convey degrees of respect or social distance. This social meaning conveyed through variation of number in pronouns has not been studied in Chinese. The data from the novel shows that there are plural pronouns referring to singular individuals and vice versa. Although in most languages, non-singularity indicates respect and politeness, it is the contrary in Chinese. An individual of inferior social status uses the plural first-person pronoun for self-reference when conversing with someone of superior social status. The plural pronoun used by the inferior individual conveys humility. On the other hand, individuals of superior social status use the second- or third-person singular pronouns to refer to a group of individuals of inferior status. The superior individuals view the group of inferior individuals as negligible and therefore refer to them using the singular. It is evident that social meaning is conveyed through variation in number of Chinese pronouns

Chinese pronominals in universal grammar: A study of linear precedence and command in Chinese and English children's first language acquisition

This paper concerns a particular problem raised by Mandarin Chinese pronouns, viz. they appear to obey a linear precedence constraint unlike English (e.g., Huang (1982)). This calls into question the nature of UG and how it can account for these crosslinguistic differences. In this paper, experimental analyses of children's (null and lexical) pronoun interpretation in Chinese and English argue for universal ‘structure dependence’ (including ‘command’) in the Initial State and against either a universal or a language-specific role of ‘linear precedence’ alone. A linear precedence effect is developmentally achieved only in Chinese. The acquisition results provoke a revised theoretical analysis of the grammar of pronouns in Chinese and a strong form of UG. We argue that it is not necessary to propose a language-specific definition of ‘command’ in Chinese in order to explain the apparent linearity effects on Chinese pronouns, and it is not necessary to propose a linear precedence rule in UG. Rather, consideration of an articulated structure of Chinese NP, which is motivated by the acquisition data, explains essential differences between lexical ta pronominals and null pronominals in Chinese and accounts for linearity effects in the adult language. We propose that ta pronominals are not themselves in argument position and are not N0 heads. They are not equivalent to null pronominals. Together the experimental and theoretical results support a ‘strong continuity’ theory of UG in which universal “principles and parameters” of UG continuously constrain the child's mapping from UG to a specific-language grammar. Language development, and the Chinese precedence effect for pronouns, lies in pragmatic/semantic features connected with the lexical realization of the specifier of a pronominal NP, not in the development of UG.

The terminations of the Archaic Chinese pronouns

Since Chinese is the crucial example of a purely isolating language, linguists have long been interested in any phenomena which suggest that some classes of Chinese words may once have been infected. A point which has attracted especial attention is the existence of a pair of 1st person pronouns, wu/*ngo- and wo/*ngấ , of which the latter has free distribution but the former is generally subject or possessive down to the second century B.C. Half a century ago Karlgren pointed out the same terminations in a pair of 2nd person pronouns, ju/*ńo' and erh/* , and suggested that proto-Chinese had pronoun declension, with -o marking the nominative and genitive and -a the accusative (but his evidence of restricted distribution was inconclusive except in the case of wu). Later Kennedy preferred to explain the distribution of wu by classing it with various other pronouns and particles in which the level tone is associated with uncompleted utterance (so that either, like wu, they are never phrase-final, or they are phrase-final but interrogative, as with hu/*g'o- and the other interrogative particles). A further important contribution is Chou Fa-kao's discovery of a possessive termination -ǝg, which he ascribes to fusion with the possessive particle chih/*ǝg- . In 1969 I myself proposed a classification of the pronouns into two systems, the pre-Classical and the Classical.