Bridging anaphora in Chinese (BRANCH)

5/20/2022: Short talk at ELM2, University of Pennsylvania.

Title: Effects of instruction on semantic and pragmatic judgment tasks.

Abstract, poster, slides, and proceeding paper (draft).

Sentence judgment tasks are used often in linguistics studies. However, there is no consensus on how significant the effect of instruction is in such tasks: some argue that instruction is trivial, while others argue that it affects the way participants respond. In this study, we investigate different keywords used in sentence judgment tasks and determine which keyword best teases apart speakers’ response to semantically and pragmatically licit and illicit sentences. We test this in English and Mandarin, exploring the possibility of cross-linguistic variation on how speakers respond to different keywords. Our results show that the common keywords used in semantic and pragmatic judgment tasks such as ‘natural’ do distinguish semantic and pragmatic vio- lations for English speakers, but that the common Mandarin translations of these words fail to distinguish between the two types of violations. Our results highlight the need for language- and study-specific norming procedures in sentence judgment tasks.

8/4/2022: Flash talk at GLOW in Asia XIII, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Title: Mandarin bridging: experimental data and theoretical implications.

Abstract, slides, and proceeding paper.

Bridging, or associative anaphora (Clark, 1975), is a phenomenon where a definite expression is licensed based on some relation to a context. Schwarz (2009) argues that two types of bridging must be distinguished: part-whole that identifies the target referent based on situational uniqueness, and producer-product that identifies the target based on relational anaphora to another discourse referent. 

In this work, we present systematic empirical data on Mandarin bridging to re-examine the arguments in Jenks (2018) and Dayal & Jiang (2021), two analyses of Mandarin bare nouns and demonstratives. To evaluate the two predictions against natural language data, we investigated the naturalness of the two kinds of bridging in a sentence rating task, manipulating antecedent and anaphor noun type, among other factors. 

Our results are not accounted for by either Jenks’ or Dayal & Jiang’s analyses. We argue that this calls for a more gradient view of bridging in Mandarin, where both bare nouns and na constructions can denote familiarity.

8/17/2023: Talk at ICTEAP-4, Dongguk University.

Title: Status of Mandarin demonstrative na: evidence from bridging.

Slides.