Constraining the comprehension of pronominal expressions in Chinese
Introduction
Isolating the cognitive mechanisms that interpret pronominal expressions is a central issue in the cognitive sciences. Pronominals do not have an invariant referent but instead refer to different entities depending on the social and linguistic context that makes up the universe of discourse in which they appear. Thus, they offer a special vehicle for probing cognition as it is situated in context. In most cases the pronominal inherits its referent from another expression, its “antecedent”. Together the antecedent and the pronominal “co-refer” to the same entity in the universe of discourse. Most attempts to make the problem tractable adopt the strategy of hypothesizing constraints (or filters) that contribute to the interpretation of the pronominal by limiting the set of potential antecedents. While different disciplines have addressed pronominals and the factors constraining their interpretation, they have chosen to focus on distinct facets of the phenomena. In the process, they have engendered rather disparate theories that, we believe, need to be drawn into closer coordination.
Linguistics has focused on the pattern of interpretation within a single utterance. The dominant theory in this domain is a structural (or “categorial”) one (Chomsky, 1986). It identifies a privileged structural relation (the relation of c-command; Reinhart, 1983) that serves as a filter to exclude some nominal expressions in the utterance from being a potential antecedent for the pronominal. There is no attempt to provide a mechanism that determines the antecedent for the pronominal; it is assumed that this lies outside the domain of sentence grammar (Lasnik, 1976). Competing theories adopt the same general strategy of specifying what nominal expressions are excluded as potential antecedents. They differ principally in whether those excluded nominal expressions are identified by non-structural criteria such as grammatical function (e.g. subject, direct object, etc.) or semantic role (e.g. argument of a predicate, agent, etc.). Bresnan (1999) is an example of work appealing to grammatical functions; Partee and Bach (1981), Keenan (1974), and Williams (1994) all appeal to semantic roles. The differences between these competing approaches are most visible in their treatment of sentences that lack phonologically realized subjects. The sentences in (1)–(3) have similar meanings but very different superficial forms.A structural account recognizes an implicit but phonologically unexpressed pronoun in (2) and (3), parallel to the English “I”.1 A semantic account avoids making the structure of these sentences parallel but expresses their similarity in terms of a semantic property (e.g. agent) that is shared by all three examples. An account based on grammatical functions only posits a pronoun in (1). In (2) the grammatical function subject is paired with the verbal inflection expressing the subject's person and number features. In the Chinese example (3), where there is neither an expressed pronoun nor any verbal inflection, the grammatical function subject is not paired with any overt element in the sentence structure. It remains implicit, present only in the functional requirements of the verbal predicate.2
Psychology and computer science have pursued a different goal. Their research objective has been to understand how an antecedent for a pronominal is selected from a discourse model built up from a series of utterances (cf. Johnson-Laird and Garnham, 1980, McKoon and Ratcliff, 1992). This ambitious goal is an issue that linguistics is largely silent on. These disciplines attempt to construct algorithms that determine the preferred antecedent of a pronominal. In this search some psychological studies (e.g. Gernsbacher, 1989) have drawn attention to the role of world knowledge. Computer scientists have devoted more attention to how such appeals to world knowledge can be made explicit, typically by way of conventionalized constraints on interpretation (Hobbs, 1979, Partridge, 1991, Schank, 1973). Interesting work has shown in some detail how distinct semantic classes of verbs help to narrow the selection of an antecedent for a pronominal (Ehrlich, 1980, Garnham et al., 1996, McDonald and MacWhinney, 1995). There is also evidence that the antecedent of a pronominal is selected from the set of nominals matching its lexical, morphosyntactic features such as number and gender (Garnham and Oakhill, 1985, MacDonald and MacWhinney, 1995, Matthews and Chodorow, 1988, Shillcock, 1982). For utterances making use of verbs from the same semantic class, where morphosyntactic cues do not identify a unique antecedent, there appears to be some filtering effect of syntactic organization. The literature in this area has not made many assumptions about what aspect of syntactic organization is relevant. Theoretical linguistics distinguishes structural (or categorical) information from grammatical functions (such as subject or direct object). For the most part researchers in psycholinguistics have employed the terminology of grammatical function uncritically. One strand of thought uses grammatical functions to require a pronominal to find an antecedent with the same or “parallel” grammatical function (Grober et al., 1978, Sheldon, 1974) or with a privileged grammatical function, typically “subject” (Crawley et al., 1990, Fredericksen, 1981, Smyth, 1994). A second strand of thought identifies a metric of discourse prominence that ranks potential antecedents. The influential work of Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein (1995) makes the assumption that this ranking is determined by the grammatical function of NPs, although other syntactic factors have also been advocated (Strube & Hahn, 1999). The work reported in Gordon and Scearce (1995), Gordon and Chan (1995), and Gordon, Grosz, and Gilliom (1993) provides some experimental corroboration for the utility of such definitions of discourse prominence. It remains to be determined experimentally whether the syntactic effect is best modeled as a consequence of grammatical functions or of structural or semantic factors. A final approach to such issues would frame the problem in terms of the frequency of words and the co-occurrence of words, arguing that ease of processing should be understood with respect to frequency of tokens rather than with respect to the understanding of language in terms of the manipulation of symbols and syntactic structures (e.g. MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994 for the case of syntactic ambiguity). This approach is limited both by the absence of the relevant language statistics in many interesting cases, and by the difficulties in drawing causal inferences from correlations between frequency and processing ease.
It should be clear from this foreshortened overview that the general directions of research in linguistics and in psychology and computer science have diverged. Some important attempts to synthesize the results of these distinct research traditions and coordinate their theoretical proposals have been attempted. Nicol and Swinney (1989) have argued that the structural restrictions on co-reference isolated in the linguistic literature act as a preliminary filter limiting a set of potential antecedents to assist in the resolution of a pronoun's antecedent. Matching of lexical, morphosyntactic features and other interpretative processes then further narrow these candidates. Badecker and Straub (2002) have provided some evidence against this temporal dissociation between structurally defined candidate sets and morphosyntactic candidate sets, suggesting instead that both factors operate simultaneously as constraints to narrow the set of potential antecedents of a pronoun. In our previous work (Gordon and Hendrick, 1997, Gordon and Hendrick, 1998), we have attempted a synthesis that makes both prominence in a discourse and matching of lexical, morphosyntactic features weakly sensitive to the structural position NPs occupy in an utterance. This paper examines the on-line comprehension of Mandarin Chinese pronominals using experimental measurement of reading times. Our goal is to evaluate how successfully the theories of pronoun resolution that have been previously proposed on the basis of English can generalize to the description of Chinese. We will show that the notion of discourse prominence and lexical feature matching are more sensitive to syntactic factors than was previously recognized. We will present evidence that prominence is sensitive to structural factors rather than grammatical functions or semantic roles. In this way we push further our synthesis of the distinct research programs surveyed above.
Past research suggests that the study of Chinese can contribute to the understanding of the mechanisms underlying language comprehension because of its similarities and differences with English and other European languages, which have provided most of the data for theory in psycholinguistics. For example, Huang and Hanley (1994) explored processes underlying word recognition by using special features of written Chinese, and Gelman and Tardif (1998) have explored generics and concept formation in Chinese. In the domain of sentence comprehension Li, Bates, and MacWhinney (1993) reported a reaction-time study of distinct sentence constructions to investigate how semantic roles are assigned to nominals in Chinese sentences. Here we attempt to exploit special properties of Chinese to probe the comprehension of pronominals. Although Chinese is historically unrelated to English and there is little in the way of morphological affixes on nouns or verbs, Chinese and English are broadly comparable because they share important clausal properties relevant to the understanding of pronominals.
Both Chinese and English have descriptions, names and overt pronouns. In both languages the distribution of these expressions is influenced by syntactic and discourse factors. However, unlike English, Chinese has phonologically unexpressed pronouns (i.e. null pronouns) that do not code morphosyntactic features such as gender (Li & Thompson, 1981). Scholars of Chinese grammar have generally agreed that null pronouns occur quite often in both classical and modern Chinese texts (Li, 1985, Li, 1997, Li and Thompson, 1984, Ma, 1935, Wang, 1955). Early linguistic studies in Chinese anaphora differentiated overt and null pronouns by their semantic functions and pattern of distribution (Ma, 1935, Wang, 1955). This general point of view continues in more contemporary linguistic analyses (Li, 1985, Li, 1997, Li and Thompson, 1981, Li and Thompson, 1984) which have suggested that null pronouns are used primarily to co-refer with the most-focused referent in a discourse although the overt pronoun can be used for the same purpose in some contexts. Due to its lexical features such as gender and number, an overt pronoun has an advantage over a null pronoun in its ability to co-refer with a less prominent referent in a discourse representation that matches its lexical features (Yang, Gordon, Hendrick, & Wu, 1999). In short, the null pronoun has been well recognized for its abundant use in classical and modern Chinese text. Furthermore, overt and null pronouns can often be used for the same purpose in a discourse, referring back to the most prominent referent in the preceding text.
Chinese and English also have similarities and differences with respect to word order. Both languages have the canonical sentence form of subject–verb–object (henceforth S-V-O) for basic sentences where the subject is typically an agent and the object is typically a patient.3 This parallel can be seen in (4). Chinese offers variations on this canonical pattern. One resembles the passive construction in English in that the patient is mapped onto the initial subject position and the agent is optionally expressed as a complement of the oblique prepositional particle bei (). This pattern is illustrated in (6). In addition, Chinese has some surface word order patterns unavailable in English. One such construction can be observed in the ba construction of (5). Here the theme of the verb, fang (, put), appears as a complement of ba ().
These distinct sentence constructions have been the focus of linguistic analysis (cf. Huang, 1982, Huang, 1994, Li, 1997, Zou, 1992). We will assume here that the abstract structure of a Chinese sentence is as in (7). We will assume with Huang (1994, p. 162) that [V e] is a causative verb like make but without phonological expression. That verb can combine with the lexical verb fang (, put) by syntactically raising fang, thus producing the sentence in (4).4 Alternatively, fang can remain in place and the dummy verb ba () can be inserted to replace [V e]. Updating slightly Huang's analysis, we assume that the direct object shu () will be promoted to become the direct object of ba. This raising is required to provide case to the direct object.5 This will generate the sentence in (5). The passive-like construction in (6) is produced by projecting the agent not onto the subject position, but onto an “oblique” position as the complement of the preposition bei (). This bei phrase is an adjunct in the sense that it is only optionally present in a sentence and can be omitted. The patient of the verb in this construction comes to occupy the surface subject position rather than the canonical object position.6
If prominence is defined over semantic roles such as agent and patient we would expect all three sentences to have essentially the same influence on subsequent pronominal co-reference. This expectation stems from the fact that all three sentences are synonymous to the extent that they have the same truth conditions (i.e. they are true or false in the same set of situations). Because they share the same predicates, they also share the same semantic roles that are linked to nominal expressions in the sentences. A very different prediction arises if prominence is characterized in terms of grammatical functions or in terms of phrasal structure. If prominence is defined in terms of grammatical functions such as subject and direct object, we expect sentences (4) and (5) to have the same influence on subsequent pronominal co-reference. This is because they only differ in the surface positioning of NPs; crucially the grammatical functions that each NP serves are the same. Sentence (6) should behave differently because the NPs have changed their grammatical function from the canonical construction in (4). On the other hand, if prominence is defined structurally we expect (4) and (5) to have different effects on subsequent co-reference because, even though the grammatical functions are the same, the hierarchical organizations of the sentences are distinct: in (4) the object is in the complement of the (raised) verb; in (5) the object is in the specifier position of the (unraised) verb.
The experiments in this paper test these competing claims about the fundamental nature of prominence in a discourse with a series of experiments that examine how the comprehension of pronominals is modulated by the structure of the three types of sentences illustrated in (4)–(6). Table 1 provides a sample passage illustrating the experimental manipulations that we used. One manipulation was the word order of the first sentence (Canonical, BA, or BEI constructions). A second manipulation was the discourse relationship of the second sentence with the first sentence (continue vs. shift). As the connecting lines in Table 1 illustrate, the continue condition leads the pronominal to co-refer to the leftmost named character of the initial sentence. The shift condition forces the pronominal to co-refer to the rightmost name in the initial sentence.
In addition to the manipulation of discourse relations and of prominence through the structure of the first sentence, we also manipulated the type of referring expression in the second sentence. This was done so as to provide evidence about whether the set of potential antecedents for a pronoun is narrowed exclusively by prominence characteristics, defined either in syntactic or semantic terms, or whether this candidate set is also delimited early in processing by lexical feature matching. If prominence features are exploited early, and independently from lexical feature matching, we should find a difference in the ease of interpreting pronouns following sentences (4)–(6) regardless of whether the nominals lexically match the pronouns to be interpreted. On the other hand, if matching operates early in processing we would expect it to interact with the identification of potential antecedents in (4)–(6), so that the differences in ease of comprehension in (4)–(6) might be eliminated when lexical features identify a single potential antecedent. To examine this, the gender of the two named characters in the first sentence could either be the same gender or different gender. This manipulated whether co-reference for the pronominal expressions in the second sentence was ambiguous or unambiguous. In addition, different forms of pronominal expressions (overt/null pronoun) were realized for the grammatical subject of the second sentence across different experiments.
The comparisons outlined in Table 1 provide a very rich source of potential evidence about the nature of discourse prominence and how it interacts with feature matching in the comprehension of pronominals. However, the relations in Table 1 are too complex to be pursued in a single experiment. The four experiments presented below focus on those comparisons of conditions that can provide the greatest evidence about these questions.
Section snippets
Experiment 1
This experiment examined whether syntactic factors (either structural relations or grammatical functions) or semantic roles modulate the process of pronominal resolution. Nominal expressions in a sentence are provided with three types of information in most linguistic theorizing: structural status, grammatical function, and semantic role. They are syntactically assigned a structural (or categorial) status (as an NP). In addition they stand in a syntactic relation to the predicate; this is the
Experiment 2
Experiment 1 introduced a situation with ambiguous co-reference for the subject pronoun of the second sentence, and demonstrated that the comprehension of an overt pronoun was modulated by the accessibility of discourse referents as determined by their syntactic relations. The current experiment investigates how lexical features, particularly gender, contribute to the processing of pronominal resolution during discourse integration. According to Gordon and Hendrick (1998) and Yang et al. (1999)
Experiment 3
Experiment 1 showed that the accessibility of a nominal as a candidate antecedent for a pronominal was a function of a syntactically-derived notion of prominence rather than one based on semantic roles. Prominence of this kind had a direct impact on sentence comprehension, making the shift condition more difficult than the continue condition for both the Canonical and the BEI construction. Experiment 2 suggested that this effect of prominence was present only when the antecedent of a pronominal
Experiment 4
Experiments 1 and 2 contrasted the canonical word order and the BEI structure in an attempt to examine how the syntactic prominence of a discourse entity and lexical features, such as gender, modulated subsequent processing of pronominal resolution during discourse integration. The results indicated that the comprehension of pronominal expressions was primarily modulated by the syntactically-derived accessibility for discourse referents in the model of discourse. In addition, the lexical
General discussion
A series of self-paced reading time experiments investigated how the comprehension of pronominals in Chinese is modulated by their form (overt vs. phonologically null), their discourse relation to the preceding sentence (continue vs. shift), and the word order of the preceding sentence (Canonical, BA or BEI) as illustrated in Table 1. Experiment 1 showed that reading times of sentences containing overt pronouns that had ambiguous reference in terms of gender were slower in the shift condition
Acknowledgements
The research reported here was supported by a Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation Dissertation Fellowship 2000 to Chin Lung Yang from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and by a grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS-0112231). We would like to thank Dr Nai-Shing Yen of National Cheng-Chi University for advice in experiment designs and helping to recruit participants, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the paper.
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