Getting to Know Referring Expressions: Anaphor and Accessibility in Mandarin Chinese

Referring expressions are used to refer to entities in the world directly or independently. They can also be used to refer in a way that depends on some linguistic antecedents for referent interpretation. These latter referring expressions are called anaphors and the entities they refer to are antecedents. How does a hearer know exactly which antecedent a particular anaphoric expression refers to? This is the problem of anaphor resolution. Anaphor resolution has become something of a growth industry for cognitive scientists interested in an abstract characterization of the syntactic phenomenon involved or in modeling thought processes and developing natural language processing systems. Anaphora has proved to be well-suited as a testing ground for such enterprises since attempts to model anaphor resolution have shown. that it involves a surprisingly large number of variables: lexical, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and even suprasegmental.