Aspects of anaphora in Chinese and in some Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, the ‘syntactic’ versus ‘pragmatic’ language typology, and Neo-Gricean pragmatics

Abstract

Anaphora refers to a relation between two or more linguistic elements, in which the interpretation of one element (called an anaphoric expression) is in some way determined by the interpretation of another element (called an antecedent). Two types of anaphora – (i) null subjects and (ii) long-distance reflexivisation – will be briefly compared and contrasted between Chinese and some Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, showing how they are different typologically. Following Huang, Y, Anaphora: A cross-linguistic study. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000a, Huang, Y, Bayesian probabilistic model of discourse anaphoric comprehension, linguistic typology, and neo-Gricean pragmatics. Theoretical Linguistics, 39, 95–108, 2013a), utilising intra-sentential anaphora as a testing ground, I shall re-hypothesise that languages in the world can roughly be divided into two groups: syntactic (such as English, French, and German) and pragmatic (such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). Finally, I shall outline an analysis of long-distance reflexivisation in Chinese in terms of my neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora.