A Study Of The Dynamic Anaphora Of Chinese Reflexive Ziji

This dissertation is a study on the dynamic anaphora of Chinese reflexive ziji. It has been generally accepted that ziji, as a long-distance anaphor, may refer to an antecedent outside the very local domain. The studies on the long-distance anaphora of ziji so far have been mostly conducted from the syntactic or pragmatic perspective and the focus of the studies is the syntactic or pragmatic constraints for the co-indexation of ziji with one or more noun phrases when there are two or more antecedent candidates in a sentence. But none of the syntactic or pragmatic theories or principles has presented a satisfactory account for it, because, as suggested in this dissertation, the long-distance anaphora of ziji should be regarded as a result of the comprehensive effect of various factors such as syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, cognitive factors.A dynamic perspective is proposed to explain the long-distance anaphora of ziji. As discussed in this dissertation, the dynamics of the anaphora of ziji is reflected in three aspects:the first, the dynamics of the semantic meaning; the second, the dynamics of the anaphoric structure; the third, the dynamics of the cognitive process.The study in this dissertation on the dynamic anaphora of ziji is conducted from the above-mentioned three aspects. Firstly, the semantic factors affecting the anaphora of ziji are explored in terms of the effect of the semantic orientation of the verb. It is shown that in a sentence, if there are two or more candidate antecedent NPs for ziji, if the syntactic factors remain unchanged, the referential relationship between ziji and its candidate antecedent NPs is determined by the semantic orientation of the verb:when the verb of the matrix clause or small clause has a clear semantic orientation or acquires a clear semantic orientation due to the effect of the adverbial modifier, ziji is co-indexed with only one of the NPs; otherwise, ziji is co-indexed with two or more NPs.Secondly, based on the Principle of Compositionality, the structure of NP de NP de NP and the passive bei-construction are used as examples to investigate the structural constraints on the dynamic anaphora. It is suggested that there is a dynamic relationship between ziji and its candidate antecedent NPs and the anaphoric strength between ziji and its antecedent candidates is affected by the syntactic structure of active or passive voice and the semantic or structural relationship among the NPs. If the semantic factors remain unchanged, the anaphora of ziji is determined by the syntactic relations among the sentence constituents. In other words, the anaphoric relation between ziji and its candidate antecedents is affected by the meanings of the syntactic constituents and the rules linking the constituents.Thirdly, psycholinguistic evidence for the dynamic anaphora of ziji is provided. It is shown that the dynamic nature of ziji and the cognitive process contribute to the dynamic anaphora of ziji. The processing mechanism of the dynamic anaphora of ziji is proposed in the form of a comprehensive model in which the syntactic, semantic and cognitive factors are incorporated to indicate the comprehensive effect of the factors on the anaphoric relation between ziji and its antecedent.