The Impact Of Animacy And Pragmatic Information On The Processing Of Chinese Obiect Relative Clauses

Great importance has been attached to study of the processing of relative clauses (RCs) for their complex structure and potential ambiguity in sentences. Among the conclusions is that the animacy of nouns, the position of relative clause, discourse context and other factors may affect sentence processing both in the RCs of English and Chinese. On the basis of the previous researches, the present paper focused on the impact of animacy and pragmatic information on processing Chinese object relative clauses (ORCs) so as to solve the remaining questions in the relevant studies. Eye-tracking method was used in three experiments. The results showed that 1) the animacy of nouns influenced the processing of Chinese ORCs with less difficulty in inanimate head noun condition before relativizer "DE"((的) but more difficulty after "DE",2) pragmatic information facilitated the ORCs processing,3) there was no interaction between pragmatic information and animacy, indicating that they played their parts independently in sentence processing.