Accessibility Of Personal Pronouns, Noun Phrases Without Definitive And Zero Pronouns In Chinese Discourse Anaphora Processing

A discourse usually treats of many entities which are not isolated but relative to one another. The coreference of an anaphoric expression and an antecedent is one of ways of discourse coherence. The anaphora processing is very important to comprehension and production of a discourse. Thus it has become one of the interdisciplinary foci in many disciplines.Much research work has been done about anaphora processing and varies of processing models has been submitted to reveal the mechanics in pragmatics, formal semantics, psycholinguistics and computational linguistics. The accessibility theory submitted by Ariel has an impact on the other theories. It is assumed in the accessibility theory that reduced anaphoric expressions such as personal pronouns and zero pronouns have higher accessibility than the complex noun phrases such as full names and definitive noun phrases so that the arrangement of anaphoric expressions in discourses is one of the ways of discourse coherence. Psycholinguistics focuses the facts that influence the anaphora processing such as the form of anaphoric expressions, structure prominence, semantic features of anaphoric expressions and meaning of verbs.Zero pronouns and noun phrases without definitives are widely used in Chinese discourses. It is assumed that zero pronouns have the highest accessibility and involve some cultural pragmatic implications while noun phrases without definitives are used as the default definitive NP, i.e. a special type of descriptives. However Chinese lacks a formal special functional definitive word as "the" in ling 1 ish. A noun phrase without definitive is not always used as default definitive descriptive in referential biasing, attributive biasing and generic biasing context, which influences the anaphora processing.A self-paced reading on computer is used as previous anaphoraprocessing research in this research. In addition, some reading surveys are made in the form of pen-paper. The aim of the experiments is to probe the accessibility of some anaphoric expressions besides zero pronouns and noun phrases without definitives in Chinese discourses and the facts influencing anaphora processing such as structure prominence, meaning of verbs and discourse context. Some theoretical discussions are made to explain the mechanics of Chinese anaphora processing. It is found that in Chinese discourses zero pronouns express the pragmatic meaning of modesty rather than make discourse coherent for its higher accessibility than personal pronouns, especially in the discourses in the form of first person. It is also found that noun phrases without definitives in Chinese discourses tend to be interpreted as non-definitives and its anaphora processing is influenced by meaning of verbs and discourse context.