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

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.