Cognitive And Pragmatic Studies Of Subject Ellipsis In Chinese

Ellipsis has been regarded as a permanently hot topic in linguistic study. It is not only relevant to questions in syntax, but germane to rhetorical, psychological, cognitive and computer studies. Domestic research on ellipsis has recently turned from semantic, syntactic dimensions to a pragmatic one. More studies now start from the perspectives of discourse and context. But studies on subject ellipsis, which is a typical phenomenon in the use of Chinese language, lack a cognitive perspective to explore its generative causes and comprehension mechanisms. It is this type of findings that provides the psycholinguistic underpinning for the idea of 'subject ellipsis as a processing instructor' in the human language production. No uniformity has been made explicit in diverse theories, nor have cross-disciplinary pluralistic views been adopted in cognitive and psychological analysis of subject ellipsis in natural languages. There are not many reports on subject ellipsis studies in the natural language processing in computers or machine translations. With the development in computer science, studies on subject ellipsis and ellipsis recovery have great significance in human-computer dialogues and natural language comprehension.The most intriguing in language studies may be the "how and why" of certain language phenomenon. As far as subject ellipsis is concerned, mysterious issues arise such as the production and comprehension of elided parts, and the accompanying psychological and physiological processes. This paper is an attempt to sort out some of the considerations - particularly the cognitive considerations - involved in such matters. It is written in the spirit, not of providing any final answers, but of trying to clear the air of proliferating obfuscation as well as of providing suggestions for profitable lines of both linguistic and psychological research. Based on previous researches and abundant examples in Mandarin Chinese, empirical studies are carried out on the distribution of zero anaphors, pronouns and full noun phrases in a closed corpus of five classical contemporary novels, and production and comprehension of subject ellipsis are closely inspected through two paralleling psycholinguistic experiments. Conjugation of two explanatory theories - Accessibility Theory and the Principle of Economy is realized, with context as the interface to combine the two, which has both filtering and refilling effects on subject ellipsis in language communication.The first chapter serves as the introduction of research background, purposes and significances, based on a detailed review of relevant studies on ellipsis and subject ellipsis both home and abroad. The second chapter is seen as a fulcrum for later corpus studies and experiments, mainly focused on the subject and subject ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese. The third chapter presents the theoretical background for empirical studies. It starts off from natural language comprehension and communication, puts forward a concept of communication from cognitive and psycholinguistic standpoints. It then introduces the Principle of Economy, the Principle of Least Efforts, Accessibility Theory and illustrates factors which influence the accessibility and prominence of referential expressions in discourses. Chapter four is operated in two modes of description, one of which can be thought of as a linguistic descriptive mode, the other the psychological experimental mode. The first mode aims to disclose the patterns and rules of subject ellipsis in narrative texts. In the second mode, on the other hand, it is assumed that generation and understanding of subject ellipsis can be predicted. The preference and tendency in the use of subject ellipsis can be discovered through identification and continuation experiments. Chapter five explores the generating motivations in subject ellipsis, using the Principle of Economy and the Accessibilty Theory, based on the results from the experiments in the previous chapter. Thus "a speaker-based generative mechanism" is established and the psychological preference and cultural motivatations are disclosed as well. The sixth chapter goes further to analyze the double effects of context in the production and comprehension of subject ellipsis, a speaker-based filtering effect and a listener-based refilling effect. The potential of accessible contexts to realize the economy for both parties involved in the communication is depicted with rich vivid examples. The last chapter points out the need for further researches in children's first language acquisition and daily use of ellipsis. On-line experiments such as self-paced reading or eye-tracking will be employed to submit more reliable results on the difficulty and characteristics of comprehension of discourses containing elided structures.As a cross-disciplinary study of discourse analysis, cognitive pragmatics and psycholinguistics, this paper forms a new theoretical framework to explain subject ellipsis, with a systematic description of the distribution of subject ellipsis in narrative texts and an empirical study of identification and production of subject ellipsis in real natural language.