Demonstratives In Chinese: A Text-Discourse Study

This is a study of demonstratives in Chinese based on a corpus. The goal is to adopt and examine the claim that the choice of different forms of demonstratives is determined not by the spatial distance of referents to the speaker but by the accessibility degree of the intended referents.Chinese, like many other languages in the world, has its own system of demonstratives. It consists of proximal demonstratives "zhe/zhei" and their related compounds/phrases and distal demonstratives "na/nei" and their related compounds/phrases. Traditionally, it is assumed that spatial distinctions are primary for demonstrative uses. For example, zhe is used when the referent is close to the speaker, while na appears when the referent is distant from the speaker. However, the actual uses of demonstratives operate in a much more complicated fashion and the traditional view does not account well for all the uses in our corpus. Sometimes, the same referents can be referred to by two opposite demonstratives. In these cases, the distinction of proximity and distality makes no sense in the explanation.In this paper, we adopt the Accessibility Theory put forward by Ariel which indicates that the choice of proximal and distal demonstratives is correlated with the accessibility of the intended referent. Ariel suggests that natural language primarily provide speakers with means to code the accessibility of the referent to the addressee. Here, accessibility is defined in terms of the differing degrees by which referents may be retrieved from memory and how different referential expressions mark these different retrievability values. This theory provides cognitive grounds for anaphoric reference in discourse and makes detailed and well-argued predictions concerning the relationship between memory, focus of attention and saliency, and the linguistic forms of expressions used to refer to discourse entities. This theory proposes that the different choice of referring expressions shall be determined by the different accessibility degree of the intended referents. There are four factors affecting accessibility: distance, saliency, competition and unity. All the referring expressions form one continuous scale of Accessibility markings. Demonstratives are intermediate accessibility markers. Moreover, proximal demonstratives mark relatively higher accessibility than distal ones and head demonstratives mark relatively higher accessibility than modifier ones.We collect data from a 5415000-word corpus, which is collected from issues of a popular kind of newspaper - People's Daily. We only search for all the demonstratives used in this newspaper dated from January 1, 2000 to February 1, 2000. A total number of 2031 uses of demonstratives in corpus are obtained, consisting of 1771 instances of proximate ones and 260 instances of distal ones. Then we conduct analysis to the data from the aspects of demonstratives' syntactic functions, referential types and factors affecting accessibility. All of the frequency counts are counted and calculated by manual efforts. The results show that when the accessibility of intended referents is higher, the speaker prefers to choose proximal demonstratives than distal demonstratives in case the speaker uses demonstratives as the referring expression. That is, a referent may be coded with a proximal form when it is more salient and shorter distanced than the one with a distal form because it is more accessible to the listener. However, it shall be noted that all demonstratives do not mark intermediate accessibility. There are a small number of demonstrative uses marking high accessibility.