Browsing by Author "Liu, CSL"

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Antilogophoricity, epithets and the empty antilogophor in Chinese
(2004-07-01)
Liu, CSL
;
外國語文學系
;
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
The null object in examples which Xu (1986) provides to argue against the existence of the subject-object asymmetry of the kind observed in Huang (1982, 1984, b) in fact is an empty antilogophor (henceforth EA) subject to Binding Condition B and the Empty Antilogophoric Condition. I believe that there are at least two types of null objects in Chinese, namely the EA and the variable. The former must occur in a pragmatically neutral environment. Seen in this way, Xu's examples at first sight appear to be problematic for Huang's (1982, 1984a, b and 1987) Null Topic Analysis, but upon a closer scrutiny turn out not to apply. The Empty Antilogophoric Analysis of the Chinese null object in Xu's examples has two theoretical and empirical implications: first, the proposal is reminiscent of Dubinsky and Hamilton's (1998) Antilogophoric Analysis of English epithets; this further implies that Huang's (1991) Null Epithet Analysis of null objects, which suggests that the Chinese null object is the null counterpart of epithets subject to Binding Condition C, is inadequate. Second, the patterns observed may indicate that there are at least three types of antilogophors in chinese; these are not independent of each other but represent different degrees of directness in which antilogophoric attitudes manifest themselves.
Pure reflexivity,pure identity, focus and Chinese ziji-benshen
(2003-01-01)
Liu, CSL
;
外國語文學系
;
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Chinese anaphors can be divided into two semantic types: One (the X-benshen 'X-self' anaphor, in which X is the ziji 'self' or pronoun-ziji 'pronoun self') requires pure identity with its antecedent; the other (the non-X-benshen 'non-X-self' anaphor) allows near identity with its antecedent. Pure identity shown by the anaphor ziji-benshen 'self -self' can be derivable from the semantic composition of the near reflexive function of the morpheme ziji 'self', the focus function of the morpheme benshen 'self' and the operator status of ziji-benshen 'self-self' while near identity (or near reflexivity) shown by the non-X-benshen 'non-X-self' anaphor is due to its being "a pronoun in coreference." In other words, in Chinese pure identity is near reflexivity plus a focus marker which picks out the best representation of the antecedent that happens to be the actual person. Thus, the X-benshen 'X-self' anaphor should not be considered a pure anaphor without content. Typologically, there are two ways for human languages to get pure identity: One is by using an anaphor without content; the other is by using a focus marker that picks out the best representation of the antecedent which happens to be the actual person. The typological difference in establishing pure identity provides an answer for the long standing question of why the notion of coargumenthood is often adopted by linguists in defining binding conditions in languages which show an antilocality effect but seldom in Chinese. The distribution and coindexation of all Chinese anaphors, either the X-benshen 'X-self' anaphor, are determined by one single syntactic condition, namely, the traditional binding theory, regardless of whether they are inside or outside the coargument domain. In contrast, in languages which show an antilocality effect, the binding theory allows both pure and near anaphors within the coargument domain but Condition R filters out one of them in the absence of lexical/morphological reflexivity; however, outside the coargument domain, the binding theory itself governs the distribution and coindexation of all anaphors.