汉语焦点信息影响代词回指的电生理机制

The Influence of Focus Structures on the Interpretation of Pronoun in Mandarin Chinese: Evience from ERP

作为话题延续和语篇衔接的重要手段,代词是最为重要的回指形式之一。目前虽然有关代词回指的研究有很多,但这些研究主要关注句法和语义因素如何影响回指加工,很少考察话语(语用)层面的信息结构,尤其是焦点结构,如何影响回指解读,也没有考察不同类型的焦点信息如何通过与句法角色、动词语义以及距离远近等因素的相互作用来决定回指解读。为此,本项目将在以往研究的基础之上,选择两种不同的焦点结构——自上而下的焦点(语言焦点)和自下而上的焦点(非语言焦点),并借助高时间分辨率的ERP技术,考察这两种不同类型的焦点信息对代词回指影响的异同,以及它们与句法、语义和距离等因素相互作用于回指加工的认知和神经机制,从而揭示在汉语句子理解中来自语言和非语言的信息通过何种关系模式影响回指加工和句子表征。具体研究问题包括:1)自上而下的焦点信息如何影响回指加工;2)自下而上的焦点信息如何影响回指加工;3)焦点结构、句法角色和动词语义对回指加工的综合影响。

Up to now, although there have been a great number of studies conducted to deal with the problem of pronoun resolution, most of these studies were concerned with the question of how syntactic and semantic constraints influence the process of pronoun resolution. The question of how pronoun resolution is influenced by pragmatically-based constraints, i.e. information structure （especially focus structure） has not received as much attention in the literature. In particular, we know little about the processes of how focus structures interact with other linguistic information, such as grammatical role, verb semantic, and distance-related factors, to determine the interpretation of pronoun. The purpose of this project is to gain insight into the question of how information structure, namely focus structures, influences the interpretation of the pronoun. In order to achieve this aim, we choose two different types of focus structures, that is, a top-down focus structure （linguistic focus） and a bottom-up focus structure （non-linguistic focus）. More specifically, by measuring the latency and amplitude of Event related potential （ERP） components, we want to reveal the process of how these two different types of focus structures exert their influence on pronoun resolution, and during this process whether/how different focus information interact with syntactic and semantic information. Moreover, we also want to reveal the correspondingly electrophysiological correlates underlying these different processing stages. The systematic studies of how focus structures exert their influence on the process of pronoun resolution and especially, how focus information interacts with other syntactic and semantic information during pronoun resolution, can tell us how linguistic constraints （top-down information） and non-linguistic constraints （bottom-up information） interact with each other to contribute to anaphor resolution and sentence representation. Specifically, there are three key questions to address in this project, which are： 1） how top-down focus information influences the pronoun resolution; 2） how bottom-up focus information influences the pronoun resolution; 3） how focus structure, grammatical role, and verb semantic interact with each other during pronoun resolution.