The Division of Labor Between Null and Overt Pronouns in Discourse Anaphora

The primary purpose of the current research is to investigate the division of labor between null pronouns and overt pronouns in Chinese discourse anaphora.Two studies were conducted, with Study 1 (the self-paced reading experiment) investigating comprehension processing and Study 2 (the corpus analysis) investigating production processing. The results indicate that:1) There is a division of labor in promoting discourse coherence:when referring to subject antecedents, the null pronouns play a larger role; when referring to object antecedents, the overt pronouns play a larger role.2) Despite the absence of a clear-cut division of labor in anaphoric interpretation, the null pronouns and overt pronouns diverge in their preference patterns:the null pronouns are significantly biased towards referring to the subject antecedents, whereas the overt pronouns are not significantly biased in comprehension processing and are more mildly subject-based than the null pronouns in production processing.3) The anaphoric biases of null pronouns and overt pronouns are affected by two discourse coherence factors:one is the expectancy of different coherence relations in the discourse, and the other is the contributions of null pronouns and overt pronouns in different coherence relations.