"Interpretation and Processing of Japanese Reflexives" at Pitt, February 24.

The University of Pittsburgh's Department of Linguistics will host PhD candidate Noriyasu Li and his colloquium "Interpretation and Processing of Japanese Reflexives" on February 24.

My research investigates how native speakers (L1) of Japanese link reflexives to their antecedents through experimental research on specific sets of anaphoric pronouns – zibun, zibun-zisin, kare-zisin, and kanozyo-zisin. The research also examines how L2 learners acquire these properties in Japanese. Although it is well known that co-reference with these reflexives can be ambiguous (Aikawa, 2002), I analyze how L1 Japanese speakers successfully construct anaphoric relations among determiner phrases and resolve ambiguity through an analysis of case and argument structure of the verb. The interaction between case and the predicate in reflexive-antecedent binding, to my knowledge, has not been thoroughly addressed in the literature to date, and this point is the innovative focus of my research. Further, I expand the scope of reflexives to all reflexive forms in Japanese, and cross-linguistically analyze acquisition between typologically related (e.g., Korean) and unrelated (e.g., Chinese) languages.

The talk begins at 3:00 pm in 332 Cathedral of Learning (map) and is free and open to the public.