A Comparative Study on the Impact of Verb Implicit Causality on Inter-clausal Anaphoric Bias in Chinese and English

Abstract

Verb implicit causality is a semantic feature that influences language processing, such as pronoun resolution and sentence generation, by implicitly suggesting the potential focus of an event's cause. Previous studies demonstrate that in inter-clausal anaphora resolution, the bias of verb implicit causality toward either NP1 or NP2 (in “NP1 Verb NP2” structure) affect the selection of antecedent. From a comparative linguistic perspective, this study employs a corpus-based approach, collecting linguistic data for 150 Chinese verbs through sentence completion experiments, in order to compare the features of verb implicit causality in Chinese and English. A database of Chinese verbs is constructed with variables including semantic categories, emotional overtones of verbs, and gender effects. It follows by a quantitative analysis of Chinese and a comparison between Chinese and English. The findings indicate that Chinese verb implicit causality exhibits an overall bias for NP2 in inter-clausal anaphora resolution, aligning with the trend observed for English. However, the strength of NP2 preference in Chinese is significantly higher than that in English. Furthermore, semantic category, emotion of verbs, and gender also show significant effects, with certain cross-linguistic correlations observed between Chinese and English. This study advances the research on verb implicit causality by providing a viable methodological framework and a dataset containing factors from a comparative Chinese-English perspective.