A Comprehensive Approach To The Anaphora Of Chinese Reflexive Ziji

The present thesis is a comprehensive study on the anaphora of bare reflexive ziji in Chinese. The reflexive ziji in Chinese has its own characteristics:ziji can form a long-distance binding relation with its antecedent out of the local domain, which attracts the attention of linguists home and abroad. Scholars have put forward several theories to illustrate the long-distance binding of ziji, but the pure syntactic or pure pragmatic approaches could not provide adequate explanations. The long-distance anaphora is the result of the interactions of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors. So in order to study the anaphora of ziji, a comprehensive approach including the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors is adopted.The thesis is based on Cheng’s nature analysis of ziji and Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). The pronominal feature of ziji makes the long-distance anaphora possible. During the analyses of the syntactic structures within the framework of RRG, it is found in the present thesis that when there is a single potential antecedent in the sentence, ziji tends to be coindexed with the actor in the local domain. Due to the semantic meaning and pragmatic function of the modifiers such as adjectives and adverbs and the influence of context as well, ziji can sometimes be interpreted as non-coreference, and also can point to some non-argument components. When there is more than one potential antecedent, the general rule is that ziji would seek the coreferring core argument which is one of the semantic co-arguments in the clause as its antecedent. In complex sentences, there would be complex structures as nuclear junctures, core junctures and clausal junctures. In the core junctures, the argument of the matrix core which stands as the controller of the matrix core and also be linked to an argument position in the embedded logical structure of the core juncture should be chosen as the antecedent of the reflexive. In the clausal junctures, all the actors which are of the same person features with the actor of the core in which ziji appears would be possible candidates for the antecedent. In the process of semantic-syntactic influence, pragmatic factors such as the context play an important role, which can help eliminate ambiguities and even decide the binding relation of ziji.Therefore, the present thesis concludes that the interpreting of ziji involves factors from syntax, semantics and pragmatics. The interaction of syntax, semantics and pragmatics is realized through the following three representations:the representation of syntactic structure, which displays the actual structure of the sentence; the representation of semantic meaning, which represents the lexical meaning of linguistic expressions; and the representation of pragmatics, which corresponds to the communicative function of the sentence. The representation of pragmatics would act as a linking to relate the syntactic and semantic representations, i.e. during the semantics-syntax influence, the pragmatic factors including the context play an important role and influence the understanding of syntactic structures. Therefore, the interpretation of the Chinese reflexive ziji should be conducted at the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface.