“自己”是谁?——对约束原则的实验研究

Who Is “ziji”:an Experimental Study about the Binding Principle

本文通过两个行为实验,考察了无语境条件下,汉语反身代词“自己”回指的认知加工方式。实验一采用语句选择(sentencegating)作业,考察了被试利用韵律信息确定反身代词“自己”回指的可能性,结果表明听着很难利用韵律信息确定反身代词“自己”的回指;实验二利用跨通道启动(crossmodalpriming)和词汇命名作业,考察了被试对反身代词“自己”的认知加工,结果表明当目标词和小主语有关时,反身代词“自己”对目标项的启动效应要大于目标词和大主语有关,表现出“局部约束”(localbinding),这与约束理论的A原则是符合的,而与汉语反身代词的“长距离回指”现象相矛盾。

One of the differences between English and Chinese is that in English reflexives can only take a local (LOC) antecedent, whereas the Chinese reflexive ziji can have a long-distance (LD) antecedent as well as a local one. Another property of long- distance reflexives is subject orientation; that is, the reflexive can only be bound by a subject. Linguists accounted these phenomenon in term of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic theories. This study conducted a cross-model-priming experiment to explore the role of syntactic structure in Chinese reflexive ziji coreferent without context. Participants listened a sentence, such as “Laoshi gaosu jizhe yao zunzong ziji”(Teachers told the journalist to respect self.). The last word (prime) may be a reflexive(ziji (self)), pronoun(Ta (him ))or r-expression(Laoren (old man)). At the end of the sentence, a target word was presented on the center of screen, and subjects were asked to read the target word. There are three kinds of target word: subject bias word, e.g. Xuesheng(student ), object bias word, e.g. Xinwen(news), and neural word, e.g. Yinxiang(sound box). The results show that when the prime is ziji, the reaction time of object bias word will be shorter than subject bias item; opposite pattern will be as the prime is a pronoun. These results consist with binding principle A and B, and differ from the LD and subject orientation.