A Study of Zero Anaphora Resolution in Chinese Discourse: From the Perspective of Psycholinguistics

Anaphora is the main linguistic means to establish discourse coherence, and anaphora resolution is the psychological process to maintain this coherence. Chinese discourse is characterized with providing multiplicity of linguistic clues to readers by employing various referential apparatuses such as pronoun anaphora, zero anaphora, and so on. As a way of avoiding repeated reference to an object that is mentioned beforehand, zero anaphora is frequently employed in discourse. The production and resolution of zero anaphora largely concerns some constraints underlying psychological mechanisms. We particularly focus on zero anaphora resolution in the present study to try to discover some specific aspects of the underlying mechanism, hoping to find out some factors unique to the resolution process. We designed the first two experiments to probe into the psychological reality when participants were presented with sentences containing either pronoun anaphora or zero anaphora or both under discourse condition with topic continuity in Experiment 1a and topic discontinuity in Experiment 1b. We did not find any significant difference in the reaction time between zero anaphora resolution and pronoun anaphora resolution, indicating that zero anaphora possibly works within the processing mechanism on which pronoun anaphora resolution depends. However, we found significantly longer time in reading the first sentence in any of the discourse, showing that the first-mention effect exists in anaphora resolution. We further explored the time course of zero anaphora resolution by measuring the reaction time during the period when participants read sentences that varied according to the location where zero anaphora occurred under two conditions: topic continuity (Experiment 2a) vs. topic discontinuity (Experiment 2b). The strategies of searching for the referential information were found divergent: the exhaustive searching strategy was adopted when the topics within a discourse were kept continuous and the heuristic searching strategy was employed when the topics were discontinuous. The design of Experiment 5 took the factor of voice type and situation consistency into consideration, investigating in what way do those factors influence the resolution of zero anaphora. The voice type, according to the results, plays a significant role for its exclusively close relationship with the first-mention effect.

Nominal suffixes as markers of information structure in Basketo

This paper deals with the information function of two nominal suffixes, -i appearing in all nouns, and -n- in first- and second-person pronouns in Basketo, a North Omotic language predominantly spoken in the Basketo Special Woreda in Ethiopia. The suffix -i is often described as nominative. However, object nouns without definite marker can be marked by -i, and as a result -i can appear in both subject and object in the same sentence. We analyze morpheme -i as a marker of specificity. Suffix -n- distinguishes short and long forms of the first- and second-person subject pronoun. The short form is the same as the possessive. In general, the possessive does not bear any pragmatic information in discourse. Therefore, short pronouns also show no pragmatic function, but show what is subject or agent in a clause. On the other hand, long pronouns are morphologically and pragmatically marked. We analyze morpheme -n- as the foregrounded topic in discourse in contrast with zero anaphora.

The Complexity of Zero Anaphora in Chinese Discourse: An Event-related Perspective

One zero anaphor (henceforth, ZA) in Chinese discourse is not necessarily identified with an antecedent which must be found somewhere as a syntactic constituent in a clause. Most studies claim that the referent of zero anaphor is either co-referential with the next ZA or completely different from the next ZA; however the view is not necessarily reliable. This study considers several types of complex cases where referents of ZA can be extracted from several syntactic positions or that never emerge in the context. The complexity of ZA referents thus far surpasses the explanations offered by the current theories, such as the topic chain, accessibility, or discourse structure. This study proposes two principles: co-referential topic and event integration to interpret what causes the complexity of ZA referents in Chinese discourse. Further, this study figures out a mathematical method (hypergraph) to simulate how Chinese native speakers process complex ZAs. This study therefore is significant to make a deeper understanding of the complexity of zero anaphora in Chinese and expand the vision of anaphora.

Text-linguistic Analysis of Infinitival Subjects of Opaque Reference in Modern Italian

The article presents an empirical study of zero-anaphora in co-referential chains – an inscrutable and opaque phenomenon in modern Italian that takes place when the verb bears no number or gender marking due to its form and there is no indication of its actual subject. Methods from text linguistics are applied to corpora compiled from three novels by modern Italian authors.