Resolving Zero Anaphoric Shifting In Chinese Discourse—A Data-based Research

Zero anaphora is a form of anaphora widely used in Chinese.When its antecedent and anaphor are in different syntactic positions,it is called zero anaphoric shifting.This dissertation,on the basis of linguistic facts,analyzed zero anaphoric shifting with the focus on two of the factors affecting the salience of discourse entities,namely,hierarchy and animacy.Hierarchy is an external formal factor affecting salience,while animacy is an internal semantic factor.This dissertation systematically studied zero anaphoric shifting from the perspective of both internal and external factors,and conducted resolution on the basis of corpus analysis and interpretation.Hierarchy,salient in human perception,is a potential force guiding language expressions.Language uses vary according to hierarchical changes.Hierarchy embodies two concepts of hierarchical relationship and hierarchical type.Hierarchical relationship refers to the variability of hierarchy and hierarchical type the formation of different hierarchical relationships.Hierarchical types can be sub-categorized into grammatical hierarchy and semantic hierarchy.In the realization of zero anaphoric shifting,hierarchical change is related to the salience rank of grammatical roles,and the adjustment of hierarchy can partly make up for the inadequate salience of grammatical roles.According to the zero anaphoric shifting corpus,changes in grammatical hierarchy also have perceptual salience which is under the interference from other factors and the interferences may affect the anaphoric relationship.In addition,the various syntactic structures related to grammatical hierarchy,with heterogeneity in nature,are restricted by different syntactic restrictions.The corpus mentioned above shows that the changes in semantic hierarchy results from the combined effects of the salience of the former clause and the complementarity of the latter clause,and semantic hierarchy is more explanatory than grammatical hierarchy.Animacy also has perceptual salience in human mind.Animacy(hierarchy)and language expressions interact with and influence each other with human as the pivot.In the zero anaphoric relationship,the animacy sensitivity rank of syntactical positions of the main antecedents is as following: subject>object>topic which is different from the salience rank of grammatical roles,indicating the academic significance of discussing the animacy distribution of antecedent.Among the animacy distributions of shifted zero anaphora,the “inanimate-animate”combination is absent in the subject genitive structure of “SM de S”.This absence could be explained in two aspects: the animate tendency of the subject genitive and the interaction between animacy and topicality.The influence of animacy on the position of genitive is called “strong animacy effect” and the effect of animacy is also related to the hierarchy between clauses.The shifted zero anaphora referring to the entities in the object position,including existential structures,can be better studied from the perspective of animacy hierarchy and they are all influenced by“weak animacy effect”.Meanwhile,the weak animacy effect also presents quantitative changes.In addition,the corpus analysis reveals that narrative texts are more sensitive to animacy while non-narrative texts are more sensitive to animacy hierarchy.The analysis of hierarchy and animacy in shifted zero anaphora shows that relevant resolution parameters can be further debugged and optimized,and could be summarized and integrated into the salience rank.Two salience ranking rules based on hierarchy and animacy can be summarized as follows:a.Same-level salience ranking: T/T1 > the first-appearing animate entity >S/S1 > O/IO/O1 > OM > OBL/ADV > OBLMb.Cross-level salience ranking: O1 > IO/O > OBL > TM > T >SM> SThe above two ranking rules were applied as the optimal conditions to the algorithm design,and resolution verifications have been conducted with an accuracy rate of 94.3%.Wrong resolutions could be attributed to the six factors of animacy,topic,hierarchy,oblique,clause segmentation and punctuation marks,etc.