Logophoricity and the processing of Chinese reflexives

This study investigates the linguistic properties of two reflexive pronouns in Chinese, ziji (‘self’) and ta-ziji (‘s/he-self’), and how the exempt use of these reflexives relates to the notion of perspective-taking or logophoricity. Using offline forced choice judgment and online self-paced reading experiments, we find that these two reflexives are more similar than typically assumed in the theoretical literature. Both reflexives are sensitive to the discourse topical status and the logophoric role (source/perceiver) of their long-distance antecedents. Relating discourse topicality and the Logophoric Hierarchy to perspective-taking, we posit that perspective-taking is a unifying factor that drives the exempt use of these two reflexives. However, these reflexives differ slightly in that ta-ziji requires a more prominent perspective center than ziji does. In addition, the current study shows that during incremental processing, different types of discourse information can be accessed at different processing stages, which contributes to our understanding of the accessibility of linguistic cues during real-time anaphora resolution.