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result(s) for
"Chinese language Reflexives."
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Discourse prominence effects on interpretation of reflexive pronoun “ziji” in children with ASD
The core of language disorders in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the loss of social function in language communication. Further, the correct use and processing of personal pronouns is the basis of language social function. Therefore, clarifying the mechanism of processing the pronoun reference in children with ASD is a major focus in autism research. Currently, the main contradictory focus of the anaphora processing ability in children with ASD is use of semantic pragmatic information in the process of pronoun processing. Therefore, this study will focus on the effect of semantic cues on pronoun processing in children with autism spectrum disorder. This study uses the Chinese reflexive pronoun \"ziji\" (eg., himself/herself) as the media, because the Chinese reflexive pronoun \"ziji (oneself)\" is relatively flexible, which is not only restricted by the rule of syntactic rules, but also influenced by the semantic information of the antecedent. This study investigated the processing mechanism of Chinese reflexive pronoun \"ziji (oneself)\" in children with autism spectrum disorder by manipulating the position of strong semantic cues. The results showed that participants from both the experimental group (children with ASD) and the two control groups (children with typical development and children with intellectual disabilities) were able to process strong semantic cues. When the second person pronoun \"you\" or the s participant’s name appears in the remote subject position, children from both the experimental group and the two control groups could use semantic information to make long distance anaphora of the reflexive pronoun \"ziji (oneself)\". Conversely, when the second person pronoun \"you\" appeared in the close subject position, the children with autism spectrum disorder and the two control groups would both make close anaphora with the reflexive pronoun “ziji (oneself)”. This study found that children with autism spectrum disorder can process semantic information normally during pronoun anaphora when the semantic cues are sufficiently prominence. The results of this study provide a more comprehensive understanding of the language processing mechanism of individuals with autism spectrum disorder.
Journal Article
Mandarin de-adjectival degree achievements as inchoative statives
Mandarin degree adjectives can give rise to a degree achievement reading with the perfective marker le . In this paper, I argue that de-adjectival degree achievements in Mandarin are inchoative statives, whose core meaning component is a reflexive comparative that compares the present state with a previous state in some property of the same individual. My new analysis better captures the facts that de-adjectival degree achievements show variable telicity, that they give rise to stative readings with duration phrases, and that they are compatible with time as a comparative standard. Because the comparison is between two states at different times, a degree-achievement reading can be inferred even though the predicate is stative in semantics.
Journal Article
Local versus long-distance bound implicit arguments of inalienable relational nouns in Chinese
This paper argues that inalienable relational nouns in Mandarin Chinese, specifically kinship nouns (KNs, e.g. father, sister) and body-part nouns (BPNs, e.g. head, face), have an implicit reflexive argument. Based on a syntactic comparison between KNs, BPNs, locally and long-distance bound reflexives, we argue that the implicit reflexive arguments of BPNs must be locally bound, whereas that of KNs can either be locally or long-distance bound. We conclude that these two types of implicit arguments in Mandarin Chinese correspond to locally and long-distance bound reflexives, respectively. We analyze this difference in connection with binding theory and a theory of logophoricity. We argue that the implicit argument of BPNs is a locally bound anaphor and cannot be used as a logophor, whereas that of KNs can, supporting a proposal that the logophoric property leads to long-distance binding, as argued by Huang & Liu’s (2001) for reflexives in Mandarin Chinese.
Journal Article
Unpacking the blocking effect: Syntactic prominence and perspective-taking in antecedent retrieval in Mandarin Chinese
In the linguistics literature, it is generally agreed that the non-local use of the bare reflexive ziji in Mandarin Chinese is sensitive to perspective centers. The introduction of a local first-person pronoun encoding the comprehender’s perspective is assumed to make non-local binding unavailable, a phenomenon called the blocking effect. We conducted two sets of offline and online experiments that examine the blocking effect associated with ziji, to better understand whether and how it is affected by the syntactic status of the blocking pronoun (subject vs. object). By comparing the forced-choice judgment results in Experiments 1 and 2, we find that syntactically prominent subject blockers lead to stronger blocking compared to object blockers, and that the strength of the blocking effect can be modulated by verb semantics. Furthermore, only subject blockers caused blocking during incremental real-time processing; object blockers did not. These experimental results have implications for both the linguistic formulation of the blocking effect and for sentence processing models.
Journal Article
On the Implicit Anaphoric Argument of Relational Nouns in Mandarin Chinese
This paper provides experimental and theoretical evidence for the syntactic realization of an implicit possessor argument in Relational Nouns (RNs, e.g. father) in Mandarin Chinese. The results of Experiment 1 show that the antecedent of the implicit argument in RNs must be a noun phrase (NP) in the sentence where the RN is located, rather than an NP in the discourse context. Experiment 2 shows that the implicit argument of RNs must be bound by a c-commanding NP. The results exclude the possibility that the RNs’ implicit argument is a pronominal that would link to a contextually salient NP and would not require a c-commanding referential antecedent. Rather, the experimental results show that the identification of the antecedent of the RNs’ implicit argument is constrained by the same principle of binding theory that constrains the reflexive zìjǐ ‘self’, specifically requiring a c-commanding antecedent.
Journal Article
On the reflexive-possessive markers in the Dongxiang language
Dongxiang is a language mainly spoken in the Autonomous District of southwest Gansu Province, People’s Republic of China. The Dongxiang nationality (東鄉族), as they are officially called, represents about 300,000 speakers. The Dongxiang language is one of the peripheral Mongolic languages spoken in the Gansu-Qinghai area, also known as the Shirongol group. These languages have been isolated from the other Mongolic languages and have been influenced by the surrounding Chinese dialects to a greater or lesser degree. They have common typological forms inherited from Middle Mongolian as well as features which have been induced by language contact. In this paper, I shall discuss the reflexive possessive markers in the Dongxiang language with a special focus on the suffix -nugvun . I shall show that the functions and use of Dongxiang reflexive possessive markers -ni and -ne are similar to those of the common Mongolic markers * -ni and * -xAn . The reflexive possessive marker -nugvun seems to be found in Dongxiang only and its origin remains unclear. In sources available from the 1980s to the 2000s, it is found associated with a restrictive number of pronouns, nouns, and idiomatic expressions and is highly grammaticalized. However, in more recent sources, it is found associated with a greater number of nouns and seems to have more semantic implications. Moreover, it is also found in a role which could be associated with that of a pronoun, and which can receive a plural and reflexive morphology. Nugvun can be used completely independently and is probably a calque of the Chinese dialect of Linxia 個家 ge 42 jia 243 . This shows that it is most probably an innovation developed from the original suffix.
Journal Article
Reverse transfer of L3 on the Interpretation of L2 Reflexives
English reflexives allow only for short-distance binding except for exempt anaphors, while Chinese and Korean reflexives can be both short- and long-distance bound. This study examines the cross-linguistic influence of L3 Korean on L2 English in the interpretation of reflexive bindings with Chinese and Korean participants. 30 Chinese-English (CE), 20 Korean-English (KE), and 23 Chinese-English-Korean (CEK) participants completed an English proficiency test and a Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT). The results of proficiency test showed KE scored significantly higher than CE and CEK, while the latter two were comparable. Nevertheless, although the mean scores of TVJT revealed marginally significant variance, Post-hoc comparisons showed KE scored significantly higher than CE, but not than CEK. CEK displayed numerically higher score than CE, though not significantly. The findings mirrored the pattern in Ahn & Jang (2019) in that L3 seemed to play a more robust role in L2 acquisition. The variation in TVJT between CE and CEK was unlikely to be introduced by either L1or L2 proficiency. Aligning with the Foreign Language Effect Model, L2 may be changed to reflect patterns in L3 when a specific feature was not common for both languages.
Journal Article
The Impact of World Knowledge on the Processing of Mandarin Possessive Reflexive zijide
It has long been considered that the Mandarin possessive reflexive
zijide
can be either locally bound or long distance bound, leading to ambiguity where it fails to exclusively refer back to either long distance binding NP or the local NP. In addition to syntactic factors such as the local versus long distance division, the present study examined the potential influence of general world knowledge on the interpretation of
zijide
. Three experiments, two offline sentence evaluation tasks and one online sentence reading task, found that
zijide
could be either facilitated or impeded by world knowledge carried in the NPs of the sentence. The results showed that in some cases,
zijide
was considered exclusively referring back to the long distance NP. These findings seemed to support the notion of subject orientation effect and demonstrated the influence of world knowledge on the processing of Mandarin possessive reflexive
zijide
.
Journal Article
Voice and Meaning-Making in Team Ethnography
Drawing on research on complementary schools in the United Kingdom, this presentation considers some of the issues in the research method used in studying this after-school community site. Processes of analysis employed by the ethnography team are disclosed so as to illuminate the dynamics of theory building in a large research team.
Journal Article