CRL Talks

Pronominal forms that can be used to refer to 3rd person singular antecedents in Mandarin Chinese include a 3rd person singular pronoun ta (he/she), a 3rd person singular reflexive taziji (himself/herself) and the long-distance reflexive ziji (self), unmarked for person or number. Traditionally (within modern generative grammar, e.g. Huang et al. 2009), ta and taziji are treated as a pronoun and a reflexive, respectively, abiding by the theories of binding assumed in the syntax literature (e.g., Chomsky 1981, Pollard & Sag 1992, Reinhart & Reuland 1993, etc.), while ziji is famous for being a long-distance reflexive, an apparent exception to the Binding Theory. Much scholarship has focused on how to account for the properties of ziji (see Charnavel et al. 2017 for an overview).
However, for decades examples have appeared in the literature calling into question the classification of taziji(himself/herself) as a Binding Theory-predicted reflexive (Tang 1989, Pan & Hu 2003, Yu 1992). In this talk, I will review some of this literature and present two sets of experiments designed to explicitly compare Mandarin pronoun (ta) and reflexive (taziji) with English pronoun (he/she) and reflexive (himself/herself). Experimental set 1 uses a written acceptability and antecedent choice task to determine the basic facts of the two languages. Experimental set 2 uses visual world eye-tracking to investigate the process of resolving reference to visually displayed antecedents of the various proforms. The acceptability and antecedent choice experiments reveal that whereas Mandarin ta (he/she), English he/she and English himself/herself are all well-behaved regarding the predictions of the Binding Theory, as hinted in the theoretical literature taziji(himself/herself) is not and seems able to acceptably take a long-distance antecedent (see also Lyu & Kaiser 2023). The eye-tracking experiments confirm the expected behavior of Mandarin ta, and English he/she and himself/herself and reveal further differences between the Mandarin and English reflexives. 
Some of the processing differences appear to be due to differences in phi-features: gender features on English he/she/himself/herself can help guide reference resolution, whereas gender features on Mandarin ta are only available in the written form (acceptability) not the spoken form (eye-tracking). Whereas in English the gender features on the anaphor/pronoun can trigger similarity-based interference, the ambiguity of the gender features in Mandarin appear to create the opposite pattern: dissimilarity-based interference. These studies leave us with (at least) two questions subsequent work is being designed to start answering: (1) If taziji and ziji are both long-distance reflexives, in what ways are they similar/different and how is that characterized theoretically (a question pursued by Elsi Kaiser at USC and colleagues); and (2) What kind of model of reference resolution can account for both similarity- and dissimilarity-based interference?