Resolving Reflexive Pronouns in Chinese: An Experimental Approach

This book explores the resolution of Mandarin Chinese reflexive pronouns—ziji (‘self’) and ta-ziji (‘he/she-self’)—in language processing, focusing on how the human mind integrates multiple linguistic cues during comprehension through both theoretical and experimental approaches. This book explores the resolution of Mandarin Chinese reflexive pronouns — ziji (‘self’) and ta-ziji (‘he/she-self’) — in language processing, focusing on how the human mind integrates multiple linguistic cues during comprehension through both theoretical and experimental approaches. It investigates the structural, semantic, and discourse-level properties of these reflexives, examining how syntactic and non-syntactic constraints shape real-time resolution. By introducing new empirical data, the book challenges established assumptions about Chinese reflexives, addressing whether locality bias reflects syntactic or linear proximity, how discourse-level factors influence ta-ziji interpretation, and how perspective-taking interacts with syntactic prominence in processing. These findings are synthesized into a unified framework that integrates syntactic and non-syntactic factors governing reflexive resolution in Chinese. This work is a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students in linguistics, psycholinguistics, syntax, semantics, and language processing, particularly those specializing in Chinese linguistics, anaphora resolution, and experimental approaches to theoretical linguistics.