Phonetic manifestation and influence of zero anaphora in Chinese reading texts

The present paper conducts a pioneering study on the phonetic manifestation and influence of zero anaphora in Chinese reading texts. The stress degree of the boundary syllable and the duration of the pause at the anaphoric position are examined. The results show: i) the boundary syllable after zero anaphoric form is more accented; for the two types of zero anaphora concerned in this study, the boundary syllable after distant zero anaphoric form is more accented than that after immediate zero anaphoric form; ii) the boundary syllable before immediate anaphoric form is more accented than that before distant anaphoric form; iii) the pause before immediate zero anaphoric form is shorter than that before other types of anaphoric forms. Based on these results, the study further proposes that the syllable weight of the underlying anaphoric form is projected to the following syllable in the surface representation. Moreover, semantic distance and relation can account for the differences between distant and immediate zero anaphora.