Anaphoric biases of Chinese subject pronouns

摘要

Two offline rating questionnaire studies were conducted to investigate the antecedent bias of null pronouns (pro) and overt pronouns in Chinese in contextually neutral sentences and in pragmatically biased sentences. The results showed that contra Yang et al. (1999), the processing mechanisms underlying pro and overt pronouns were not identical. While both pro and overt pronouns were subject-biased regardless of contextual manipulations, pro showed a stronger subject bias than overt pronouns, which in turn were more favored to refer to the objects than pro. Overall, our results are consistent with the Accessibility theory (Ariel, 1990, Givon, 1983) that less specific anaphoric expressions (i.e., pro) are more favorably used to refer to more salient antecedents (i.e., subject).