A Corpus-based Study of Reflexive Possessives in Written Mandarin
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Lei, Lap-Kei
Abstract
In this thesis I examine the semantics of 1st person and 3rd person reflexive possessives and their counterpart nonreflexive possessives in the direct object position as exemplified in (1) and (2):
(1) (Zhangsani/ woi) piping-le zijii-de pengyou
Zhangsan/ I criticize-LE self-DE friend
“(Zhangsani/ Ii) criticized (hisi/ myi) own friend.”
(2) (Zhangsani/ woi) piping-le (tai-de/ woi-de) pengyou
Zhangsan/ I criticize-LE his / my friend
“(Zhangsani / Ii) criticized (hisi/ myi) friend.”
These two types of anaphora, at the first sight, show much overlap in meaning and use, which leads to the current research question, i.e. why two separate, highly grammaticalized linguistic items may exist and express the same function of coreferring the the co-arguments. To figure out their differences, this thesis proposes to adopt a quantitative corpus-based approach to investigate the usage patterns of the reflexive possessive and the nonreflexive possessive. I propose that reflexive and nonreflexive possessives are different in the viewpoint they take as well as in the speaker’s subjectivity.
The data under investigation are drawn from Sinica Corpus. The result shows the difference between these two types of anaphora expressions is viewpoint changing. For sentences with third person subjects, the speaker either takes his/her own viewpoint or the sentential referent’s viewpoint. On the one hand, when the speaker takes the referent’s viewpoint, a reflexive possessive is used, On the other hand, when the speaker takes his/her own viewpoint, a nonreflexive possessive is used. For sentences with first person subjects, speaker can only take his/her own viewpoint. Therefore, the speaker arbitrarily uses reflexive possessives or nonreflexive possessives in expressing his/her own viewpoint.
Secondly, subjectivity of reflexive possessives and nonreflexive possessives is analyzed. I argue that taking referent viewpoint help the speaker to generalize a subjective statement about that 3rd person referent. Consequently, for sentences with third person subjects, when the speaker generalizes and expresses his/her stance/evaluation toward the described event, he/she uses the reflexive possessive, and when the speaker simply reports the described event, he/she uses the nonreflexive possessive. For sentences with first person subjects, both reflexive and nonreflexive possessives can be used in generalizations. This corresponds to the result in the first part of analysis, where the viewpoint function of both reflexive and nonreflexive possessives does not show any differences in the first person narrative.
Subjects
reflexive possessive
corpus linguistics
viewpoint
subjectivity
Type
thesis
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