Processing the Chinese Reflexive "ziji": Effects of Featural Constraints on Anaphor Resolution.

ABSTRACT: We present three self-paced reading experiments that investigate the reflexive ziji "self" in Chinese-in particular, we tested whether and how person-feature-based blocking guides comprehenders' real-time processing and final interpretation of ziji. Prior work claims that in Chinese sentences like "John thought that {I/you/Bill} did not like ZIJI," (i) the reflexive ziji can refer to the matrix subject John if the intervening subject is also a third person entity (e.g., Bill), but that (ii) an intervening first or second person pronoun blocks reference to the matrix subject, causing ziji to refer to the first or second person pronoun. However, native speakers' judgments regarding the accessibility of long-distance antecedents are rather unstable, and researchers also disagree on what the e

SUBMITTER: He X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4830837 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature