句首词“这”的指别和称代用法及其回指可及性对比——一项基于新闻评论语料的量化研究

Potential Accessibility Parameters for Determinant and Pronominal Usages of zhe( this)as the Initial Word in Sentences——A Quantitative Study Based on News Commentaries

研究汉语常用词"这"篇章回指的成果很多,却忽略了在其指别和称代这两种主要用法之间的量化对比。本文利用400篇新闻评论语料,对577个句首词"这"的回指语和先行语进行了结构类型、句法功能、语义指向和篇章连贯的标注。统计检验发现,两种主要用法之间确实存在显著差异,依据可及性理论展开的主题性、竞争力等指标无法说明差异的原因所在,确定性和回指距离(间隔句数、间隔段落数)等指标则可以反映这种差异,但仍存在一些问题。这说明可及性是个复杂的概念,不同的指标对不同的回指形式有不同的反应灵敏度;同时也说明需要对大量以句子性结构为先行语的事件回指做进一步的研究。

Though a lot research has been published on the Chinese high-frequency word zhe （this）, little attention has been given to the contrastive study on its main usages as demonstrative determiner and pronoun. Based on 577 tokens of sentence-initial zhe in 400 news commentaries, we find that these two usages do show statistically significant differences in their structural types, syntactic functions, semantic categories, and discourse coherence relations. Common accessibility indices such as antecedent topicality and competition are not indicative of such sharp differences, while specificity, sentence distance, and paragraph distance are indicative but problematic. One possible explanation may be that accessibility is such a complex concept that no single parameter can show the whole picture of it. Event anaphora with a sentential antecedent deserves further investigation.