约束理论与反身代词回指研究:来自神经语言学的证据

The Binding Theory and Reflexive Anaphora:Evidence from Neurolinguistic Research

约束理论A原则规定,反身代词回指局部句法域内的局部先行词。英、汉反身代词在指称上有很大差异,后者能够违反约束理论,回指局部先行词或长距离先行词。文章对英、汉回指关系加工的神经语言学研究进行了述评,并设计系列语义启动实验对语篇理解中汉语(简单)反身代词回指的认知加工进程进行了探究。该语义启动研究表明,语境影响着语篇理解中汉语(简单)反身代词回指的整体认知加工过程,而约束理论的句法限制在其后期加工阶段起主导作用。基于已有研究和该研究获取的神经语言学证据,文章得出结论:约束理论不仅规定了英语反身代词的指称,也对汉语反身代词回指的认知加工有着一定程度的制约。基于实证研究进一步推论,句子层面和语篇层面的反身代词回指加工涉及不同的神经认知过程,并由不同机制主导。

The Principle A of the Binding Theory(Chomsky,1981;1986)prescribes that a reflexive should refer to a local antecedent within the local syntactic domain.English and Chinese reflexives perform quite differently in anaphora,and with the latter a reflexive could violate the Binding Theory and refers back to a local or a long-distance antecedent.This paper firstly reviewed those neurolinguistic studies on the processing of English and Chinese anaphoric relations;and conducted a series of 3 semantic-priming experiments to explore the cognitive processes of the Chinese ziji(simple reflexive)anaphora in discourse comprehension.The semanticpriming experiments recorded and analyzed the behavioral data of the participants’lexical decision on the target words in 3 different time periods after finishing reading the priming word ziji in a(long-distance/local)referentially ambiguous sentence under long-distance or local referential context;the target words were semantically related to the long-distance antecedent or to the local antecedent,or were neutral(irrelevant to the two antecedents).Based on the results of the present experiments,the cognitive processes(3 stages)of discourse-level ziji anaphora could be concluded as:physical feature-affected early context processing(0 ms after priming word-onset)—relatively deep-level discourse reference processing(after 160 ms of priming word-onset)—syntax(Binding Theory)dominated multifactor integration(after 370 ms of priming word-onset).Closely related to the present study,Gao et al.(高立群等,2005)and Liu(刘兆静,2009)conducted semantic-priming research on ziji anaphora in sentence comprehension,based on the results of which the cognitive processes of sentence-level ziji anaphora could be concluded as:syntactic processing(local anaphora tendency)—syntactic processing(long-distance anaphora tendency)—lexical semantic integration.Although from these semantic-priming studies we observed different cognitive processes in discourse-level and sentence-level ziji anaphora,these studies indicated that both levels of ziji anaphora processing are partially influenced by the syntactic constraint from the Binding Theory.Based on neurolinguistic evidence this paper concluded:the Binding Theory not only prescribes the anaphora of English reflexives,but also to certain extent restricts the cognitive processing of Chinese reflexive anaphora.Based on empirical evidence,this paper further hypothesized that discourse-level and sentence-level anaphora processing may involve distinct neurocognitive processes that are governed by different mechanisms.