A Study Of The Comprehension Of The Chinese Reflexive Ziji

The study of reflexives is a controversial topic in the field of linguistics.According to Principle A in Binding Theory proposed by Chomsky(1981),a reflexive must be A-bound in its minimal governing category.However,the Chinese reflexive ziji often violates this principle because it can refer to an antecedent out of its local domain.In order to provide an appropriate explanation for this phenomenon,many linguists study ziji from the perspectives of syntax,pragmatics and semantics and they have achieved a lot.Various theories including parameterization analysis,LF movement analysis and neo-Gricean pragmatic analysis are proposed.However,all of these theories have certain defects in explaining the processing of ziji.In recent years,some researchers focus on the study of ziji from the perspective of semantics.They find that some semantic components such as verbs and subjects can influence the comprehension of ziji.But most of these studies are limited to theoretical discussions and there is a lack of experimental evidence in verifying these findings.Moreover,in addition to verbs and subjects,there are also some other semantic components in a clause such as attributive modifiers(i.e.adjectives)and adverbial modifiers(i.e.adverbs).It is necessary to examine whether these semantic components will influence the anaphora of ziji.In order to provide a more comprehensive explanation for the comprehension of ziji from the perspective of semantics,a psycholinguistic experiment was carried out to verify whether verbs,attributive modifiers and adverbial modifiers will influence the comprehension of ziji and how these factors influence this process.The Principle of Compositionality was adopted as the theoretical framework.A paper-pencil test was utilized with a self-made test paper as experimental material.52 postgraduates were selected in test of choosing adequate antecedent of ziji in 72 Chinese sentences which contain ziji and two candidate antecedents of it.Chi-square test(χ2 test)was used in the process of data analysis.Results of the test show that semantic components can influence the comprehension of ziji and that various semantic components of different semantic orientations usually affect this process in different ways.Ex-orientational verbs usually lead to long-distance binding of ziji,inter-orientational verbs are inclined to lead to local binding of ziji and multi-orientational verbs give priority to long-distance binding of ziji.Ex-orientational adjectives usually lead ziji to refer to the distant subject NP of the matrix clause while inter-orientational adjectives and multi-orientational adjectives cannot affect ziji to select only one NP as its antecedent.Ex-orientational adverbs lead to long distance binding of ziji,inter-orientational adverbs are inclined to local binding of ziji and multi-orientational adverbs cannot affect ziji to select only one NP as its antecedent.These findings demonstrates that syntactic operation is not the only deciding rule of natural language processing and that semantic operation can influence and react on traditional syntactic rules.Moreover,syntactic structure and intensity of influence are the two factors affecting semantic components’ influences on the comprehension of ziji.