Investigating extra-sentential factors' roles in interpreting Mandarin ziji: the interaction of extra-sentential (co)reference and intra-sentential coreference
Date
2020-08
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
This thesis addresses two problems concerning the studies of Mandarin reflexive ziji: the lack of studies on ziji’s extra-sentential (co)reference, and the disregard for extra-sentential factors’ effects on ziji’s interpretation. Through reviewing previous studies, this thesis sorted out three broad uses of ziji predicting ziji’s extra-sentential (co)reference, i.e., logophoric ziji (attitudinal ziji and empathy ziji), contemplative ziji (discursive contemplative ziji and contextual contemplative ziji), and indexical ziji. To verify the predicted uses, a corpus study of sentence-initial ziji was conducted. While logophoric ziji and contemplative ziji were validated, Anand’s indexical ziji was not. This thesis also proposed a shiftable indexical analysis for contemplative ziji: contextual contemplative ziji is analyzed as an indexical referring to the perspective center in the utterance context; the use of discursive contemplative ziji arises from a shift of the circumstances to evaluate ziji, from the utterance context to the situation where the relevant thought was produced. This analysis is different from Anand’s, where ziji is treated as an indexical referring to the speaker. Turning back to the validated uses, they demonstrate the extra-sentential (co)referential potentials introduced by discourse and context. These potentials can interfere with ziji’s intra-sentential coreference. As evidenced in an experiment testing the blocking effect in various contexts, the context “contemplation” can enhance ziji’s intra-sentential coreference with 1st person antecedents because ziji in “contemplation” allows a contextual contemplative use and its reference to the contemplator coincides with the reference derived from the 1st person antecedents. Moreover, discourse and context can affect ziji’s intra-sentential coreference by directly acting on the variables involved in ziji’s empathy use, e.g., increasing a referent’s empathy level and making the referent more likely to be empathized with. There are other extra-sentential factors affecting ziji’s interpretation. It was hypothesized that written stimuli activate more of ziji’s contextual contemplative readings than oral stimuli, though this effect from modality was not confirmed by experiment results, possibly due to the interference from the way that acceptability judgments were made. Despite this, another effect from modality was revealed, which is proposed to arise from written stimuli’s constant accessibility in contrast to oral stimuli’s evanescence.
Description
Keywords
Mandarin reflexive ziji, Logophoricity, Shiftable indexical, Extra-sentential (co)reference, Contemplative
Citation
Han, P. (2020). Investigating extra-sentential factors' roles in interpreting Mandarin ziji: the interaction of extra-sentential (co)reference and intra-sentential coreference (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.