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Further Reading

Wu Yicheng: Multiple Occurrences of the Chinese Reflexive in a Single Clause: At the Syntax-Pragmatics Interface


Speaker: Wu Yicheng (Zhejiang University)

Date: December 29, 2015 – Monday

Time: 14:30-16:30; 18:30-20:30

Venue: R606, Run Run Shaw Library, Hongkou Campus

Language: English, Chinese

Summary: Over the past three decades, many attempts have been made from different perspectives to characterize the distributional as well as referential properties of the reflexive ziji in Mandarin Chinese. In the theoretical linguistic literature (see, inter alia, Huang et al. 2009), it has been claimed that the Chinese reflexive, if occurring more than once in a single clause, can take distinct antecedents. This talk tackles possibly the most interesting puzzle in the linguistic literature, investigating how two or three occurrences of ziji in a single clause are interpreted and whether or not there are mixed readings, i.e., these zijis are interpretively bound by distinct antecedents. Within the framework of Dynamic Syntax (Kempson et al. 2001, Cann et al. 2005) which defines both representations of content and context dynamically and structurally, we show that no matter how many times the Chinese reflexive appears in a single clause, it referentially remains faithful to one and the same antecedent, for the simple reason that the speaker, when expressing a sentence, can select only one P(erspective)-Center that referentially denotes the psychological perspective in which the sentence is situated (Anand 2006).

Speaker Biography: Dr. Wu Yicheng is Professor of General Linguistics at Zhejiang University, China. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, the United Kingdom. His research interests are Linguistic Theory, Syntax-Semantics/Pragmatics Interfaces and Linguistic Typology. He has several ongoing research projects, including Verbal underspecification in Chinese: A dynamic syntax account and The dynamic interactions between syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

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Further Reading