Information accessibility and the uses of anaphoric forms in Chinese discourses

Abstract

This thesis investigates the behaviors of various Chinese anaphoric forms and tries to provide a comprehensive account of the uses of Chinese anaphoric forms using the Accessibility Theory (CT) which assumes that the anaphoric form with less descriptive information is to encode the higher degree of accessibility of the antecedent, though the clear correlation between anaphoric forms and the accessibility of the antecedent has not been clearly revealed in the previous research. This thesis examines what factors and how these factors affect the accessibility of the antecedent and the uses of different anaphoric forms in Chinese discourses. It proposes that the following four main factors will affect the accessibility of the antecedent: types of discourse structure, the topicality, the saliency in cognition, and referential distance. Discourse structure plays the most important role in determining the accessibility of the antecedent through the super-node structures: Minimal Structure, Local Structure, and Global Structure, which divide all antecedents into three sets with distinctive degrees of accessibility which decrease from Minimal Structure, Local Structure, to Global Structure. The super-node structures can greatly affect the accessibility of the antecedent, and consequently constrain the occurrence of possible Chinese anaphoric forms. The other three factors further rank the available antecedents of different sets according to the distinguished impacts of the pairs of the antecedent and the anaphor (the AN-pairs) on the accessibility of the antecedent. Finally, differently ranked antecedents based on the AN-pairs can be correlated to different kinds of possible Chinese anaphoric forms rendered by the super-node structures. In general, all the uses of Chinese anaphoric forms follow the general Accessibility Marking Hierarchy which can have different representations in different super-node structures. The most highly accessible antecedents are encoded by the simplest possible anaphoric forms which vary from zero pronouns, overt pronouns, to descriptive NPs in the MS, the LS, and the GS, respectively. Accordingly, the highly accessible antecedents are marked by the simpler possible anaphoric forms which vary from overt pronouns, descriptive NPs, to full NPs; and the lowly accessible antecedents are marked by the most complex possible anaphoric forms which vary from descriptive NPs, full NPs, to full NPs. This thesis is the first such study that identifies a set of super-node structures based on discourse structure and the ranking order of antecedents based on the topicality, the saliency, and referential distance, and shows how they together influences the uses of the four major types of Chinese anaphoric forms. The most significance of this thesis is to clearly reveal the impact of super-node structures on the accessibility of the antecedent and the uses of Chinese anaphoric forms. The major role of different super-node structures is to give a partition on various different antecedents and provide distinguished available antecedents to be encoded. Without that, it is hard to reveal the correlation between the accessibility of the antecedent and Chinese anaphoric forms, because the same accessible antecedents based on the AN-pairs may be encoded by different anaphoric forms and different accessible antecedents based on the AN-paris may share the same anaphoric form, due to the super-node structures in which they appear.