Startseite Beyond anaphoric and emphatic: diversity and unity in the functions of literary Chinese reflexive zì
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Beyond anaphoric and emphatic: diversity and unity in the functions of literary Chinese reflexive

  • Ryan Ka Yau Lai ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 29. November 2023
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Abstract

In this paper, I examine the Literary Chinese reflexive , which exhibits a crosslinguistically uncommon pattern: it performs both anaphoric and emphatic uses in adverbial position. I show that it has several uses: signalling coreference between the subject and the object, the object’s possessor or the topic or focus of a complement clause, emphasising that the subject’s identity, and indicating that the event affected the subject itself or had no external cause. I argue against categorically dividing these uses into anaphoric and emphatic uses. I propose four properties to unify the various uses: the referent of is centrally relevant to the event denoted by the predicate, coreferential with the subject, unexpected in its role in the event, and often contrasts with an alternative referent that may play same role. I compare my account to properties of reflexives in other languages, and argue that only partially supports Levinson’s (Levinson, Stephen C. 1991. Pragmatic reduction of the binding conditions revisited. Journal of Linguistics 27(1). 107–161) theory of the development of anaphoric reflexives from emphatics.


Corresponding author: Ryan Ka Yau Lai, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Zoe Fang for help with the annotations. This paper was first written as part of my Master’s thesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I would like to thank my committee, Stefan Th Gries, John W DuBois, Mira Ariel and Marianne Mithun, for their helpful comments throughout the process.

Supplementary Materials

Data, code and additional examples can be found in the supplementary materials deposited at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8301191.

Appendix: List of glosses

ACC

accusative

ASSOC

associative

CONJ

conjunction

COP

copula

DEM

demonstrative

FUT

future

GEN

genitive

HON

honorific

INST

instrumental

IRR

irrealis

JI

reflexive

LOC

locative

NEG

negation

NMZ

nominaliser

PRF

perfect

PURP

purposive

QUOT

quotative

REC

reciprocal

SFP

sentence-final particle

ZI

reflexive

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Received: 2022-10-14
Accepted: 2023-09-04
Published Online: 2023-11-29
Published in Print: 2024-04-25

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