Anaphors in Chinese (2 hours)

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Chinese anaphors (like 自己 "self") work differently from English anaphors in several ways. Let's look at some of them.

Long-distance binding

As discussed in the previous activity, English anaphors need an antecedent in the same clause. As Carnie explains, the antecedent also has to be "local"; binding to a far away antecedent is not allowed, as shown in sentences (1) and (2) below.

1. Divya_i told Mary_k not to beat herself_k up.
2. *Divya_i told Mary_k not to beat herself_i up.

As shown above, the sentence can only mean that Divya told Mary not to beat Mary up. It can't mean that Divya told Mary not to beat Divya up.

In Chinese, however, both readings are possible:

1. 张三_i 叫 李四_k 不要揍 自己_k。 ("Zhangsan_i told Lisi_k not to hit self_k")
2. 张三_i 叫 李四_k 不要揍 自己_i。 ("Zhangsan_i told Lisi_k not to hit self_i")

As shown above, the sentence can mean either that Zhangsan told Lisi not to hit Lisi, or Zhangsan told Lisi not to hit Zhangsan. Both interpretations are grammatical.

This difference is usually referred to as "long-distance binding": Chinese allows long-distance binding of anaphors, and English does not. The details of how to define "long-distance" are a bit complicated, and require some additional syntax concepts like c-command; if you are interested, you can read about them in binding and c-command.pdf.

Subject orientation

Let's think of another kind of sentence: 张三给李四一张自己的照片 ("Zhangsan gave Lisi a photo of 'self'"). Who do you think 自己 ("self") is coindexed with here?

In Chinese, it seems this sentence can only be about a photo of Zhangsan, not about a photo of Lisi:

1. 张三_i 给 李四_k 一张 自己_i 的照片 ("Zhangsan_i gave Lisi_k a photo of self_i")
2. *张三_i 给 李四_k 一张 自己_k 的照片 (*"Zhangsan_i gave Lisi_k a photo of self_k")

This property is called "subject orientation" (or "subject preference"). In Chinese, in this particular kind of sentence structure, the anaphor has to corefer with the subject (张三).

English does not have this restriction. As shown below, in a sentence like "Divya gave Mary a photo of herself", it can be either a photo of Divya or a photo of Mary:

1. Divya_i gave Mary_k a photo of herself_i.
2. Divya_i gave Mary_k a photo of herself_k.

Conclusion

What we see from these examples is that Chinese allows long-distance binding whereas English does not, and English allows binding to the object in "a photo of..." sort of sentences whereas Chinese does not (i.e., English doesn't have subject orientation for anaphors).

If you're interested in this topic, there are like a billion papers about how Chinese anaphors work, and how they're different from English. Here are some examples:

• 高立群, 刘兆静, & 黄月圆 (2005). “自己”是谁？——对约束原则的实验研究. 语言科学, 4, 39-50.
• Li, X., & Zhou, X. (2010). Who is ziji? ERP responses to the Chinese reflexive pronoun during sentence comprehension. Brain Research, 1331, 96-104.
• Chen, H. (2009). Logophoricity and ziji. Proceedings of NACCL-21, 464-481.

Continue to the following activities to reflect on these observations some more.