1NANYANG TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY

Contrastive Analysis of Pronouns across English, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese

Final Year Project 2013
Name : Yu Jie Seah
Supervisor: Associate Professor Francis Bond2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my supervisor, Associate Professor Francis Bond, for his guidance andsupport throughout this arduous and challenging FYP period. He gave me lots of valuable help
and advice when I felt confused, was understanding when I could not meet deadlines, replied
my emails with such amazing speed and was always so pleasant to talk to. Without him, I
would not be able to successfully finish this piece of work.
I would also like to thank Research Fellow Wang Shan for her help and guidance during thisperiod. She has always initiated offers of assistance and was very patient in her explanations
when I needed them. I appreciate all her comments and opinions to make my FYP a better one.
Lastly, special shout outs to my fellow FYP peers – Sheryl, Tarandip, Delia, Hui Ching, Wei
Jia, Hui Ting, Charmaine and more who have gone through this similar experience and havethus emerged as winners! Proud of you guys and of myself, of course! I would also like tothank my family and friends for encouraging me and being there for me when I’m not there forthem through this difficult period! Love you guys so very much! 3
TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES

3

ABSTRACT

4CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

5-11

1.1 PRONOUNS IN ENGLISH

5

1.4 THE CURRENT STUDY

10

1.2 PRONOUNS IN MANDARIN CHINESE
1.3 PRONOUNS IN JAPANESE

68

CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW

12-18

CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGY

19-30

3.1 THE CORPUS

19

3.2 CORPUS DATA

19

3.5 REVISION OF ANNOTATION AND TAGGING

27

3.3 COMPONENTIAL ANALYSIS OF PRONOUNS

3.4 AUTO-TAGGING AND MANUAL TAGGING OF PRONOUNS

20

25

CHAPTER FOUR: RESULTS

31-33

CHAPTER FIVE: DISCUSSION

34-43

5.1 ENGLISH HAS THE MOST PRONOUNS, FOLLOWED BY MANDARIN CHINESE AND LASTLY JAPANESE
5.2 DIFFERENCES IN THE PRONOUN LINKAGE IN BOTH CORPORA

34

34

5.3 DEPROMINALISATION OCCURS ALMOST EVENLY IN BOTH THE ENGLISH-CHINESE AND

40

5.5 LIMITATIONS42

ENGLISH-JAPANESE CORPORA

5.4 INTERESTING CASES FOUND

CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSIONREFERENCES

40

44

45-46

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LIST OF TABLES
Table No.
1.1
1.2
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
4.1
4.2
4.3

Table Title
Examples of pronouns in English
Summary of personal pronouns in Mandarin Chinese
The 9 types of pronoun features
Examples of pronouns that are categorized
Categorizing demonstratives
Categorizing quantifiers
Summary of symbols used for linking the pronouns
Number of pronouns found in the two corpora
Summary of the linkage of pronouns in the English-Chinese corpus
Summary of the linkage of pronouns in the English-Japanese corpus

Page
6
6
21
24
24
25
27
31
31
32

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ABSTRACTA qualitative and quantitative approach was used in this study to examine the distribution of
pronouns in three languages, namely English, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese based on theparallel NTU Multilingual Corpus (NTU-MC) with English being the source language while
Mandarin Chinese and Japanese translations are aligned to it at the sentence level. The
pronouns are extracted from four subcorpora – two short stories, one essay and the other is an
online article about Singapore’s tourism. However, due to time and space constraints, only
pronouns from one subcorpus - The Adventure of the Speckled Band, a short story from theSherlock Holmes series, is tagged, annotated and linked in the corpus. The results show that
although English has the most number of pronouns, Mandarin Chinese has the highest
percentage of referential pronouns. Also, English has more translated counterparts in Mandarin
Chinese as compared to Japanese. We attributed this to the difference in usage of pronouns in
the languages. Deprominalisation, surprisingly, was even for both corpora. We believed this tobe due to influence from the English text. Findings from this study can shed some light
concerning translation issues on pronoun usage for learners of the languages and also
contribute to pronoun translation across languages.

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CHAPTER ONE
1. INTRODUCTION
Pronouns are an important group of word class in languages. The way they are employed indifferent languages is interesting to many linguists. Furthermore, in such a globalized world
like today, languages are always translated into other languages. Other than translation ofcontent words, how pronouns are translated from language to language can allow one to learn a
lot about the language and its translation. English, being the world’s most globalized language,
has been translated into many different languages. Comparing its translation to Mandarin
Chinese and to Japanese can shed light on the usage of pronouns in each language.
1.1 Pronouns in English
Pronouns are a closed class of words (Carter and McCarthy, 2006) that are one of the mostcommonly seen in the English language (Balogh, 2003). Pronouns are used for their functionof replacement of nouns in noun phrases (Carter and McCarthy, 2006). For example:1a) Bobby went for a walk.
1b) He went for a walk.
In the above example (1a) and (1b), we can see that ‘he’ can be used to replace ‘Bobby’ in thenoun phrase. However, if we take out (1a) and only look at (1b), we would not be able to tellwhom ‘he’ refers to. This shows that the context the pronoun is in plays a major role indetermining our interpretation of the pronoun (Carter and McCarthy, 2006).
In English, there are several different categories of pronouns. The table below shows thedifferent categories and some examples that belong to each category.
Category
Personal Pronouns
Possessive Pronouns
Reflexive Pronouns
Reciprocal Pronouns
Indefinite Pronouns
Relative Pronouns
Interrogative Pronouns
Demonstrative Pronouns

ExamplesI, you, he, shemy, his, her, mine, ours, theirs
myself, herself, himself
each other, one anotheranything, somebody, everyone, few, both, neither
who, which, what, that, when, where
who, what, where, when
this, that, these, those

Table 1.1: Examples of pronouns in English

1.2 Pronouns in Mandarin Chinese
In Mandarin Chinese, for personal pronouns, there are three types – first person, second
person and third person. Singular and plural forms are shown in the table below (Ross andMa, 2006). The only reflexive pronoun in Mandarin Chinese is also listed.
Singular

PluralFirst person

我
wo3
I/me

Second person

你
ni3
You
您
nin2
You (polite)
他
ta1
He/him她
ta1
She/her它ta1
It自己zi4ji3
Self

Third person

Reflexive我们
wo3menWe/us (exclusive or neutral)咱们
zan2men
We/us (inclusive)你们ni3menYou他们
ta1menThey/them (masculine or non-specific for gender)
她们
ta1menThey/them (feminine)它们
ta1menThey/them (non-human or inanimate)

Table 1.2: Summary of personal pronouns in Mandarin Chinese

78
As we can see from the table above, there are fewer personal pronouns as compared toEnglish. This is due to the fact that Mandarin Chinese is not an inflectional language.
Likewise, since Mandarin Chinese does not have case markers (Li and Thompson, 1989), thesame personal pronoun is used to represent both the subject and the object.
Also, according to Ross and Ma (2006), there are no possessive pronouns in Mandarin
Chinese. Therefore, we express possessives in Mandarin Chinese by adding the particle ‘的de4’ to the pronouns such as ‘我的 wo3de mine’. However, Ng (2011) has shown that theparticle ‘的 de4’ can be omitted in Mandarin Chinese when expressing possessives as well,depending on certain factors such as postpositions and the alienability of the possessee nouns.
Similar to English, interrogative pronouns exist in Mandarin Chinese too. They are namely ‘谁 shei2 who’, ‘谁的 shei2de whose’, ‘什么 shen2me what’ and ‘哪儿／哪里 na3er/na3li3
where’. These question words are considered as pronouns due to them being able to head anoun phrase (Li and Thompson, 1989).
Mandarin Chinese also has demonstrative pronouns which are ‘这 zhe4 this’ and ‘那 na4
that’ respectively. For plural forms of the demonstrative pronouns, the measure word ‘些
xie1’ is added to become ‘这些 zhe4xie1 these’ and ‘那些 na4xie1 those’.
Other pronouns that exist in Mandarin Chinese grammar are the reciprocal pronoun ‘彼此
bi3ci3 each other’ (Sun, 2006) and indefinite pronouns such as ‘大家 da4jia1 everybody’(Yip and Rimmington, 1997).
Being a topic-prominent language (Li and Thompson, 1989), Mandarin Chinese often omits
the pronouns after the topic is established. According to Li and Thompson (1989), theseomissions are actually zero pronouns where there is an “understood noun phrase referent”.
For example,1c)这

棵树 ∅ 叶 子 很大。

Zhe4 ke1 shu4 ∅ ye4 zi hen3 da4‘This tree, (its) leaves are very big.’(Li and Thompson, 1989)
In the example above, ∅ represents the zero pronoun which exists because the topic, in thiscase ‘the tree’, was established at the beginning of the sentence and thus without the actual
pronoun, one can understand the referent.

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1.3 Pronouns in JapaneseJapanese pronouns, as compared to English and Mandarin Chinese, are a little different. They
are restrictive in their uses and in many a times are omitted completely. Due to sociocultural
factors, pronouns, especially personal pronouns are seldom used when referring to people.
Instead proper nouns or names of the person are preferred. For example,1d) Watashi wa Nakagawa sensei ni piano o narai-mashi-ta. *Kanojo wa yuumeina
pianisuto de, yoku shinbun ni mo not-te-i-mashi-ta.
‘I learned piano from Ms Nakagawa. She is a famous pianist, and often referred to in thenewspaper.’*Due to the status of Ms Nakagawa being the teacher of the speaker, ‘kanojo she’ isincorrectly used and should be replaced by ‘sensei teacher’ instead. The use of nouns insteadof pronouns is preferred because using pronouns would make the speaker appear rude anddisrespectful when referring to someone of respect such as a teacher.
(Obana, 2000)
Unlike English pronouns, Japanese pronouns do not belong to a closed class of words(Backhouse, 1993). For example, the personal pronoun ‘I’ in English, has several parallels
such as ‘watashi’ and ‘watakushi’ (used by both males and females), ‘ore’ and ‘boku’ (usedmainly by males) and ‘atashi’ (used mainly by females). These are just a small fraction ofwords that can be used to represent the first person in the language. Depending on the dialect,
the formality, politeness and most importantly, the social relationship between the speakers(Ono and Thompson, 2003), the personal pronoun ‘I’ can be expressed in many different
forms in Japanese. It goes the same for second and third person personal pronouns.
Furthermore, the so-called “pronouns” in Japanese did not started out as pronouns (Obana,2000). Many of them came about from nouns in old Japanese, which had undergone semantic
and pragmatic changes to become pronouns used in modern Japanese (Ishiyama, 2008). Takefor example one of the forms of ‘I’, ‘boku’ (‘I’ used mainly by males). It was previously used
to mean ‘servant’ but has now evolved to a first person pronoun used in informal occasions
such as when speaking to persons of the same or lower status (Ishiyama, 2008).
In addition, for the third person pronoun, ‘kare’ and ‘kanojo’ meaning ‘he’ and ‘she’, canalso be used as a noun to refer to one’s boyfriend or girlfriend as in lovers. This shows that
pronouns in Japanese are not fixed as a grammatical class, unlike those in English.
For possessive pronouns in Japanese, like in Chinese, they are expressed through the additionof a possessive morpheme, the particle ‘no’, to the personal pronouns, such as:

101e) watashi no‘Mine’
1f) kimi no‘Yours’1g) kare no‘His’1h) kanojo no‘Hers’
While for reflexive pronouns, in Japanese there is one main form - ‘jibun’ which means‘self’ and one can only interpret its referent through context as it does not differentiate by
number.
1.4 The current study
As can be seen by the brief introduction of pronouns in the grammars of the three languages,
pronouns being a form of language universals have “their inter-subjective and dialogic
character hold a primacy over individual consciousness” (Violla, 2011). However, though
they are, as their definition suggests, used across languages for similar purposes, they exist
differently in terms of the number of types and how they are used or preferred.
According to Kim (2009), there exist qualitative and quantitative differences in the usage ofthe second person and first person plural pronouns in texts he examined from English andKorean newspapers. Texts pulled from an academic multilingual corpus such as the NTU
Multilingual Corpus (NTU-MC) (Tan and Bond, 2011) seem to give similar results. Other
than personal pronouns, other categories of pronouns seem to exist and used differently in
different languages.
By analyzing pronouns of the three languages (English, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese)from three totally different language families (Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan and Japonic),
this research intends to discover and describe the similarities and differences between theirusage of pronouns and reasons for the differences. Using a corpus to do this allows for one to
examine the distribution of pronouns in the source language, to contrast their use with theirtranslated counterparts (Coussé and Auwera, 2012) and also to shed light on thecharacteristics of the individual languages (Wong, 2010). We expect the translated text (fromEnglish) in Mandarin Chinese and Japanese to have slightly more pronouns than their native
text.

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Despite this, there is surprisingly little research on comparisons of pronouns across languages
and for those that study pronouns, most of them focus on the comparison of a specific type of
pronoun such as personal pronouns on either a single language or on two languages.
Furthermore, corpus-based studies on pronouns are seldom parallel, though it is increasingly
becoming so (we will discuss past research in more detail in the next chapter). Hence, thisstudy hopes to develop a greater understanding in the way pronouns are used acrosslanguages and also to contribute to the corpus research on crosslingual pronoun usage.
The current study thus sets to find out the qualitative and quantitative differences that exist in
the pronouns of these three languages using a corpus. After introducing how pronouns workin the three languages in the first part of this paper, we go on to review past studies on the
crosslingual comparisons of pronouns using non-corpus based research and also corpus-based
studies in Chapter 2. Following after in Chapter 3, a description of the corpus used in the
study can be found with details on how it was used to analyze the results, Next, Chapter 4
presents the results and in Chapter 5, we discuss the results. In the final chapter, Chapter 6,
we arrive at a conclusion with suggestions for potential research.

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CHAPTER TWO
2. LITERATURE REVIEWThis chapter will discuss about past studies that deal with pronouns across languages and also
corpus-based research on pronouns.
Pronouns, being common across all languages, have interested many linguists and scholars tofind out more about them across languages. Chen and Wu (2011) proved that although
English plural personal pronouns are as Borthen (2010) claimed to be “referentially less wellbehaved”, this phenomenon is not limited to only plural personal pronouns as the Mandarin
Chinese singular personal pronoun ‘他’ ta1 (it/he/she*) can also be less well-behaved andrestrictive referentially. In their paper, by discussing the usage of singular ‘they’ in English,
they supported Borthen’s (2010) claim that plural personal pronouns are less restricted intheir senses as they can also refer to a singular referent depending on the context and its
usage is a pragmatic choice by the user (Chen and Wu, 2011). However, using examples ofthe Mandarin Chinese singular personal pronoun ‘他’ ta1 (it/he/she*), they showed that
depending on the environment the pronoun is in, pragmatic interpretations of the pronoun
allow it to represent plural entities as well (Chen and Wu, 2011). This argument opposed
Borthen’s (2010) study about plural and singular personal pronouns having dissimilarfunctions. From the two papers, we see that although pronouns seem easy to recognize, theenvironment they are in and our interpretation of their referents can differ greatly depending
on context and pragmatic issues.
Kashima and Kashima (1998) did a large scaled project where 71 countries (71 cultures) and39 languages were analyzed for their relationship between culture and language. The authors
calculated the cultural scores, using Hofstede’s, the Chinese Culture Connection’s (CCC),
Schwartz’s and Smith and colleagues’ (cited in Kashima and Kashima, 1998) culturalvariables, 19 in total, inclusive of individualism, moral discipline, hierarchy, paternalism
respectively and more. A literature survey was conducted to examine the main languages ofthe different countries and for the few countries with no literature available or whereinconsistency arose, native speakers were interviewed (Kashima and Kashima, 1998). The
cultural scores were then tabulated along with the languages’ relation to personal pronoun
use, particularly on first and second singular pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ and also the phenomenon
pronoun drop. The number, as well as whether the pronouns can be dropped when they are
the subject of sentences, were examined and they observed that cultures with pronoun drop in
their language are generally more collectivistic than those without (Kashima and Kashima,1998). Also, they found out that the semantics of the pronouns in question may determine the13different relationships between the speaker and the hearer (Kashima and Kashima, 1998). For
second person singular pronouns, the number largely correlates with the social structure
where languages with multiple second person singular pronouns tend to differentiate “selfother relationships” by the participants of the discourse (Kashima and Kashima, 1998). On
the other hand, for first person singular pronouns, languages with only one first person
singular pronoun have cultures that place more responsibility on the individual while thosethat have multiple first person singular pronouns do not (Kashima and Kashima, 1998). This
study gave a huge insight on the fact that cultural differences can account for the differencesin pronouns’ existence and usage crosslingually.
A majority of corpus studies crosslinguistically focuses on the semantic areas of languages
and there are few that concentrate on the grammatical areas, especially that of pronouns
unlike monolingual corpus studies where both semantics and grammar are widely researched.
For instance, Laitinen’s (2007) book – ‘Agreement patterns in English: Diachronic corpus
studies on common-number pronouns’ (cited in Mair, 2009), shows the different monolingual
corpora used for her studies on common-number pronouns. The British National Corpus(BNC) for example, helped her to find out about the usage of third person pronouns ‘he’ and‘they’ in indefinite anaphora in written forms of English of today (Mair, 2009). From the
BNC, Laitinen showed that the third person pronoun ‘they’ is increasingly being used for its
neutral gender sense instead of ‘he’ in present day English where feminism is progressively
getting stronger (Mair, 2009). Whereas the findings of pronouns and number in the Corpus of
Early English Correspondence (CEEC) helped in discovering the existence of a “typologicaldiachronic drift” which cause English to lose its grammatical gender and almost its number
agreement (Mair, 2009). Through the two different corpora, Laitinen realized the historicalfactors that affect the change in usage of pronouns in English.
Coussé and Auwera (2012) studied the human impersonal pronoun ‘man’ in Swedish and‘men’ in Dutch using a Dutch-Swedish parallel corpus. This corpus contains the target
languages in Swedish and Dutch with their translations respectively into the other languagealigned at sentence level. For the Swedish texts, seven novels and four non-fiction texts were
examined while five novels and one non-fiction text were investigated for Dutch. Findings
showed that ‘man’ and ‘men’ have overlapping meanings but are used differently across thelanguages (Coussé and Auwera, 2012). Referents of ‘man’ can be either the speaker oranother known person, whereas ‘men’ can only be used to refer to indefinite referents. In
addition, while ‘man’ appeared often in the novels and non-fiction texts, ‘men’ appeared onlyin the non-fiction texts, showing the more restricted use of ‘men’ (Coussé and Auwera,2012). Also, they found that for ‘man’ in Swedish, Dutch and English have similar personalpronouns as its correspondence, which is interesting because the impersonal pronouns for the14
two languages are etymologically different. Other than pronoun correspondents, Coussé and
Auwera (2012) also discovered a large number of substitute approaches for impersonalreference such as the agentless passive and non-finite clauses with ‘to’ infinitives. Despite
their findings, the study was not reinforced by any grammatical resource such as ParGram(Butt et al, 2002) or The GF Resource Grammar Library (Ranta, 2009).
For differences between first person plural and second person pronouns in Korean andEnglish, Kim (2009) derived qualitative and quantitative differences from his corpus study oftexts from English and Korean newspaper science popularizations. Kim (2009) collected
these texts from the online versions of two British newspapers – The Daily Telegraph and
The Guardian and two Korean newspapers – Chosunilbo and Dongailbo. The texts are also
taken from around the same period of time so that possible problems arising from changes of
the genre in different periods could be avoided. Due to the difference in frequency of the
published texts between the British and Korean newspaper and also the shorter lengths in
Korean text as compared to British text, Kim (2009) had a greater number of Korean texts
over a longer time period. He focused on “reader-involvement evoking (RIE)” acts of thearticle where the pronouns are claimed to be significant. After the comparison of the texts inboth languages, Kim (2009) found out that both the first person plural and second person
pronouns are lower in occurrence in the Korean texts and that in English, the first person
plural and second person pronouns occurred at a similar frequency while the first person
plural pronoun was employed more dominantly in Korean. The reasons for the difference inthe distribution and choice of pronouns used in the two languages he believed was due tofirstly, the linguistic features of Korean where agent omission is acceptable and secondly thesociocultural factors which have huge influences on the languages. In English, depending on
the writers’ stances, the different pronouns used can allow the writer to show solidarity withthe readers or detaching himself from them. Conversely, in Korean, the more dominant usageof the first person plural instead of the second person pronoun was most likely due to its
collectivistic society where indirectness is much preferred (Kim, 2009). However, Kim’s(2009) study is not parallel and is not backed by a grammatical resource as well.
The same applies to Smith’s (2004) study on personal pronouns and possessive determiners
in advertising texts using a English-Russian parallel corpus. Smith (2004) used two corpora
for her research where one of them is the English-Russian corpus with forty-fiveadvertisement texts in English as the source language and their Russian translations and amonolingual Russian corpus with twenty-three advertisement texts in Russian acting as acontrol. Through analyzing the corpora, she assessed her results in three categories –consumers, advertiser’s company and intermediary. She realized that the different personalpronouns, used in English to establish the relationships between consumers, the advertiser’s

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company and an intermediary, operate similarly in Russian for the Russian audience in termsof consumers but not for the companies and intermediaries (Smith, 2004). Since the second
person pronoun ‘you’ is significant in building relationships with the consumers, it is usedfrequently in the English texts and likewise in its Russian translation, although there exist aformal and familiar variant for the same pronoun, both forms are used frequently (Smith,2004). Also, for possessive determiners, both the Russian translations and the monolingual
Russian advertisement texts used them similarly to the English texts although in Russian,possessives are unnecessary if ownership is established (Smith, 2004). However, in terms of
the representation of the company, the first person plural pronoun ‘we’ was used more often
in the English texts than in its Russian translations. Furthermore, the monolingual Russian
corpus displayed the use of inclusive ‘we’, which English does not have. This was likely due
to the collectivism culture in Russia (Smith, 2004). Lastly, with regards to the intermediaries,
the first person pronoun ‘I’ was rarely found in the Russian translations and never in themonolingual corpus. This difference is also said to result due to the collectivism culture in
Russia where expression of individualism is avoided (Smith, 2004). Smith’s (2004) study
shows that the use of pronouns can indeed differ in quantity and quality due to the different
cultural backgrounds of the language in a genre different from Kim’s (2009) study above.
However, there was no back up from any grammatical resource. But, Smith (2004) compared
her results with another corpus, which is monolingual in Russian to confirm their validity.
Wong (2010), motivated by Baker’s 1992 study (cited in Wong, 2010) which found that there
is almost no grammatical category that is consistently uniform across different languages,
used the Babel English-Chinese Parallel Corpus to investigate whether the above is true by
examining existential constructions in English-Chinese translations. The Babel EnglishChinese Parallel Corpus consists of 327 English texts and their Chinese counterparts, totaling
550,000 tokens with 250,000 in English and 300,000 in Chinese. Wong (2010) focused on
existential there-constructions for her study and extracted 368 examples from the corpus.
From her study, she found that the existential constructions used in English, for a greater
extent, do not exist in Chinese and in places with complex notional subjects, Chinese tend toreorder and restructure the constructions, thus resulting in no direct correspondences ofChinese for the English source texts (Wong, 2010). To validate her results, Wong (2010)
substantiated her findings with traditional Chinese grammars and through her study, shefound that Baker’s statement holds true.
For the few corpus studies on pronouns crosslinguistically, they are usually not parallel
and/or not supported by any concrete grammar resource or database such as Wordnet (Bondet al, 2013), ParGram (Butt et al, 2002) or The GF Resource Grammar Library (Ranta, 2009).
Otherwise, they mainly deal with European languages or other grammar features (as seen

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from the studies above). Another factor to take note is that these studies usually deal with asmall, fixed set of pronouns such as specifically personal pronouns only or sometimes evenjust a subset of that, such as those that focus on the first and second personal pronouns.
Therefore, the current study hopes to fill up these research gaps by first studying othercategories of pronouns other than personal pronouns. And secondly, by analyzing the
pronouns with a parallel corpus, crosslinguistically, specifically Asian languages in contrast
with an Indo-European language (English). In particular we will look at how pronouns aretranslated (or not translated).

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CHAPTER THREE
3. METHODOLOGYThis section introduces the corpus and describes how the corpus data was annotated andanalyzed on the monolingual and crosslingual levels.
3.1 The Corpus
This project uses corpora as the base of the study. The corpus used is the NTU Multilingual
Corpus (NTU-MC) that is currently still being developed (Tan and Bond, 2011). The NTUMC exploits the linguistic diversity available in Singapore for the collection of a vast variety
of texts from different languages (Tan and Bond, 2011). The current version is an annotatedcollection of around 26,000 sentences (~595,000 words) in 7 languages (Arabic, English,
Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian and Vietnamese) from 7 language families(Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Japonic, Korean (language isolate),
Austronesian and Austro-Asiatic) (Tan and Bond, 2011). Two kinds of annotation are appliedin the NTU-MC – monolingual annotation where texts are tagged for parts of speech (POS)
and sense and crosslingual annotation where texts are aligned across sentences (Bond et al,
2013, Bond & Wang 2014).
3.2 Corpus Data
Pronouns from the three languages (English, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese) were extracted
from four data sets in the NTU-MC. They are two short stories from Sherlock Holmes – The
Adventure of the Speckled Band and The Adventure of the Dancing Men, an essay named The
Cathedral and the Bazaar and on-line articles about Singapore tourism. In each set, English
is the source language while Mandarin Chinese and Japanese translation texts are aligned to it
at the concept level. The texts have been tokenized and automatically POS tagged.
3.3 Componential analysis of pronouns
The first stage was to extract pronouns using the POS mapping and analyze themcomponentially. The pronouns were separated into nine categories namely - Head, Number,
Gender, Case, Type, Formality, Politeness, Distance from Speaker and lastly Honorific. The
features chosen are in line with other research and reference grammars (Backhouse, 1993;
Carter & McCarthy, 2006; Collins Cobuild English grammar, 2005; Li & Thompson, 1989;
Obana, 2000; Ross & Ma, 2006; Sun, 2006; Yip & Rimmington, 1997), which havepreviously examined pronouns. The purpose of this componential analysis is to code thepronouns so that we can compare and contrast them across languages. This also allows theauto-tagging programme to recognize and link the pronouns by their code. This stage tookaround two weeks due to the detailed componential analysis of every pronoun in the four

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subcorpora and analyzing ambiguous forms particularly in Japanese. Below is a tableshowing the different features under each heading (Table 3.1).

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Head

NumberGenderCase

Type

D – Demonstratives

D – Dual

F – Feminine

O – Objective

A
Existential

E – Entity

P – Plural

M – Masculine

P – Possessive

E - Elective Existential

T – Time

S - Singular

N - Neuter

S - Subjective

N - Negative

Assertive

M – Manner

O - Other

P – Person

R - Reciprocal

L – Place (Location)

U - Universal

Q - Quantifier

I - Interrogative

O – Thing (object)

S - Reflexive

Table 3.1: The 9 types of pronoun features

Formality

PolitenessDistance
SpeakerF - Formal

P - Polite

D - Distal

A - Archaic Honorific

M - Medial

H - Honorific

P - Proximal

X - Non-honorific

I
Informalfrom

Honorific

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In Table 3.1 shown above, we can see the nine different categories that were used to analyze
the pronouns. In the first column - Head, there are altogether eight components. They are
Demonstratives, Entity, Time, Manner, Person, Location, Quantifier and Object. Everypronoun extracted will be tagged with one of these features. For example, Demonstratives
refer to pronouns such as ‘this’ and ‘that’ while Entity are pronouns that do not have a
specific category of referent, as it can refer to both person and object. Such pronouns are‘all’, ‘俩 liang3 both’ and ‘いくつ ikutsu some’. ‘When’, ‘how’ and ‘where’ are examples ofpronouns labeled under Time, Manner and Location respectively. ‘Little’ and ‘many’ arelabeled as Quantifier pronouns. For English pronouns, words that end with ‘~thing’ aregrouped under Object, while for Mandarin Chinese and Japanese pronouns, they are not soclear-cut. Lastly personal pronouns and pronouns that talk about people like ‘everybody’ and‘自己 zi4ji3 self’ are categorized under Person.

The next column - Number is where we differentiate the pronouns that mark for number. For
this feature, we identified three kinds of number – Dual, Plural and Singular. ‘Both’ is an
example of Dual, ‘those’ for Plural and ‘这 zhe4 this’ for Singular.

For the third column - Gender, three features were identified as well – Masculine, Feminineand Neuter. ‘It’ in English is a neuter pronoun while ‘她 ta1 she’ in Mandarin Chinese is
Feminine and ‘ぼく boku I’ in Japanese is Masculine.
Following after, we will check if the pronouns are marked for Case (fourth column). In Case,
there are Subjective, Objective and Possessive pronouns. Only English separates for all threecases, while Mandarin Chinese has third person, singular pronouns ‘之 zhi1’ and ‘其 qi2’ forpossessive and Japanese has none.
The next column – Type, differentiates the pronouns by Assertive Existential, Elective
Existential, Negative, Reflexive, Reciprocal, Universal, Interrogative or Other. Pronouns with‘some ~’ are assertive existential as they are unspecified measures of entity, while ‘any~’ areelective existential because they can be either some or none, Negative are pronouns such as‘none’, while pronouns with the meaning of ‘self’ are reflexive. Reciprocal are pronouns thatmark for each other such as ‘彼此 bi2ci3’ in Mandarin Chinese. Universal consists of

21
pronouns that indicate all and every. Interrogative are question words and the remaining
pronouns belong to Other.
The sixth column shows Formality, whether the pronouns are informal or formal. This ismainly for the Japanese pronouns, which mark for formality. The same goes for Politenesswhere it comprises pronouns that show politeness such as ‘ 您 nin3 you’ in Mandarin
Chinese.
The eighth column - Distance from speaker, is meant for pronouns that mark for Proximal,Medial or Distal distance from the speaker. These pronouns are used for Location pronouns
such as ‘そこ soko there’ which tells both the distance from the speaker and distance fromthe recipient.
Lastly, the Honorific component is for honorific pronouns. Only Japanese pronouns aredifferentiated here. Tables 3.2-3.4 below show some examples of how the pronouns are being
categorized into their respective components.

Type
Head
EntityTime
Manner
PersonAssertive
Existential
有的／
some／
いくつ

Somebody

Elective
Existential
Any／either

Negative

Other

None／
neither

Another／
その他

Anyone／anybody

彼此

Something

Universal

Interrogative

各
自／everything ／
あらゆる

什么样／
どれ

大
家
／
everybody ／
みなさん
处处

よそ

Place (Location)
Thing (Object)对方

Reciprocal

一切／
everything

Anything

Reflexive

何时／いつ怎样
いずれ／だれ本身／自己／himself／myself／themselves／yourself／おのれ

何处／哪里／どこ／どちら什么／なに／どちらTable 3.2: Examples of pronouns that are categorised
Demonstratives
Distance from speaker

ProximalMedialDistalSingular这／此／this／この／これ那／that／その／それ

あの／あれ

Plural这些／these／これら

those／それら

NumberTable 3.3: Categorising demonstratives

22

Quantifiers
NumberPronouns
Table 3.4: Categorizing quantifiers

23
SingularlittlePluralmany

3.4 Auto-tagging and Manual tagging of pronouns
After analyzing the pronouns by their different components, the second stage wasusing an auto-tagging programme to run through them and tag them according to thecomponential analysis to the texts in the corpora at the monolingual annotation level.
This is needed because the existing Wordnets do not have synsets for pronouns. After
which, the pronouns are then linked together via crosslingual annotation by aligning
the pronouns from the source language, English, to Japanese and to Mandarin Chinese
at the sentence level. However, due to time and space constraints, for this study, themanual tagging will only focus on one subcorpus, ‘The Adventure of the Speckled
Band’ of the Sherlock Holmes short stories. At the crosslingual annotation level, thepronouns were checked manually to see if they are tagged as pronouns correctly by
the auto-tagging programme and whether the concept links between the source
language and target language are accurate. This was done several times to ensure
accuracy. This stage took around four weeks to complete both English-Chinese andEnglish-Japanese corpora, with a longer time needed for the English-Chinese one dueto the greater number of pronouns present there. On average, three to four sentences
can be done every hour.
The programme links the pronouns of the two languages together if at least five of the
pronoun features (refer to Table 3.1) are matched. For example,‘she’ has a tag 77000044-n which equates to a 3rd person, singular, feminine andsubjective pronoun and a code <3:S:F::S::::> (refer to table above) can be linked to ‘
她 ta1’ which has a tag 77000041-n equating to a 3rd person, singular, feminine
pronoun and a code <3:S:F::::::> in the English-Chinese corpus and also to ‘彼女
kanojo’ which has a tag 77000042-n, meaning a 3rd person, singular, feminine,formal pronoun with the code <3:S:F:::F:::> in the English-Japanese corpus.
The two pronouns in Mandarin Chinese and Japanese above are matched once thefirst five codes are the same and then linked up respectively to the source language
through the auto-tagging programme.
Although there are many pragmatic and social differences among the three languages,
such as Japanese being the only language, which consists of different speech levels,and can thus prevent the pronouns from linking, we decided that by including all of
the headings, we might be able to see clearer how the pronouns could be linked
together at the sentence level. Therefore, we have decided to over-link the pronouns
by matching at least five of the nine features so that we can get a more detailed resultof the linkages.
Through the auto-tagging programme, the pronouns that are matched for at least fivecodes, are linked with ‘~’ relation which are for pronouns that have related meaning
but are not identical. After working through the texts, the pronouns that are deemed
identical to each other at the sentence level have their concept link changed to ‘=’
relation which meant that they are used for the same purpose and function in their24

respective language. In the example below, ‘I’ is lexically and translation wise
equivalent to ‘我 wo3’ and thus are linked with ‘=’.
3a) English: I shall look forward to seeing you again this afternoon
Chinese: 我
盼望
下午
能
再见
到 你们。
Wo3 pan4wang4 xia4wu3 neng2 zai4jian4 dao4 ni3men2‘I hope to be able to see you again in the afternoon.’
Another concept link that was used is ‘:’ relation. Pronouns that are linked with ‘:’ arepronouns that have the same meaning across translation but is itself lexically different
from the other. For example as shown below in (3b),3b) English: It is a swamp adder!
Chinese: 这 是 一 条
沼地蝰蛇！
Zhe4 shi4 yi1 tiao2 zhao3di4 kui2she2‘This is a swamp adder!’‘It’ and ‘这 zhe4 this’ are used to refer to the same thing in its respective language but
lexically it is not equivalent – ‘it’ has a tag 77000053-n meaning it is a 3rd person,
singular, neuter pronoun with the code <3:S:N::::::> while ‘这 zhe4 this’ has a tag
77000061-n which equates to it being a demonstrative, singular and proximal pronoun
with the code <D:S::::::P:>. Since the first five codes do not match, the two pronouns
were previously not linked after the run through of the auto-tagging programme.
However, by inferring from the contextual meaning, the two pronouns are actuallytranslation equivalents.
The tagging guidelines used above are taken from Mok’s (cited in Gao, 2012) andGao’s (2012) paper where it was used as a base for the establishment of therelationships between the tokens in the source language and its counterparts (Bond etal. 2013, Bond & Wang 2014). A table showing the brief summary of the symbols
used to tag the relationships is shown below:
SymbolRelationship=
Identical meaning (Translation wise and lexical wise)~
Similar or related meaning (Translation wise and lexical wise):Translation equivalent but not lexically the same
Table 3.5: Summary of symbols used for linking the pronouns

3.5 Revision of annotations and tagging
During the manual checking of the pronouns across the sentence pairs in both theEnglish-Chinese and English-Japanese translated texts, errors in the tagging of the
pronouns and also their concept linking from source language to its translated
counterparts were found. For the last stage, we corrected these errors as we went
through the texts. Another two weeks were spent for this stage, using double thespeed for the previous stage with six to eight sentences being revised per hour.
On the monolingual level, there were two kinds of error –1. Words that are supposed to be pronouns were not tagged
a. there: Julia went there at Christmas two years ago

25b. 你们: 我
一直 在 焦急地 盼 着 你们wo3 yi4zhi2 zai4 jiao1ji2 de4 pan4 zhe4 ni3men‘I have been waiting for you anxiously.’c. 我が：我が 友 シャーロック·ホームズの手法 をここ

Waga tomo sharokku
shuho o koko
八年記

録

homuzuno

している手帳 に 記さ れた

hachinen kiroku shite iru

techo ni shirusa

reta‘I have recorded my friend Sherlock Holmes’
eight years of methods in this notebook here.’In the above three examples, the words that are underlined, function as pronouns intheir respective sentences, however, they were not tagged as pronouns, showing that
there is an error in the auto-tagging as it missed out on obvious pronouns.
2. Words that are not supposed to be pronouns are tagged
a. Dummy it: It was a perfect day, with a bright sun and a few fleecy
clouds in the heavens.
b. Pronouns in idiomatic phrases: “My God!” I whispered, “Did you see
it?”
These underlined words are non-referential pronouns. In example (a), ‘it’ is a dummy
pronoun and thus does not refer to any particular noun and in (b), pronouns used in
idiomatic phrases do not actually have any particular referent as well since they arealways used in the same way in these phrases. However, the auto-tagging programme
does not distinguish referential from non-referential pronouns (except for existential
there) through semantic differentiation yet and thus through just POS tagging, thesewords were not corrected as non-referential pronouns.
On the crosslingual level, there were also two kinds of error –1. Pronouns with the same or similar meanings that are supposed to be linked are not,a. that to 那
English: “Yes, that is the Crown.”
Chinese: “是的，那 是 克朗
旅店。”
Shi4de, na4 shi4 ke4lang3 lv3dian4‘Yes, that is Crown Hotel.’b. he to 彼
English: he refused to associate himself with any investigation which
did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.
Japanese: 彼 は 異常な、さらに は 奇想天外なKare wa ijona,sarani wa kisotengaina
調査でなければ、関わる の を 拒んだからである。
chosadenakereba, kakawaru no o kobandakaradearu.
‘This is because he refused to be involved in further
investigation that are not unusual or out of this world.’

26

The pronouns in the two examples above have the same meaning and the samereferent with their translated counterparts. Yet, they were not linked with each otheras having the same conceptual link.
2. Wrong conceptual links of pronouns in the source language to other similar
pronouns in the translated texts that exist in the same sentence
English: and then withdraw quietly with everything which you are likely towant into the room which you used to occupy.
Chinese: 随 后
带 上
你 可能
需要
的 东西， 悄Sui2 hou4 dai4 shang1 ni2 ke3neng2 xu1yao4 de dong1xi, qiao1
悄
地 回到 你 过去
住 的 房间。
qiao1 de hui2dao4 ni3 guo4qu4 zhu4 de fang2jian1
The two pronouns that were underlined were linked to each other after being run
through by the auto-tagging programme. Although as can be seen from the sentences,
the referent for the pronoun is the same one, the environment in which it is in showsthat it is not a suitable match for the linked pronoun in the translated text. The first‘you’ should be linked to the first ‘你 ni3’ and the second one to the underlined ‘你
ni3’.

27

CHAPTER FOUR

4. RESULTS
Having linked and tagged the relationships between words, we proceeded to count the
number of pronouns in each language and their links. The results shown are solely
based on one subcorpus – The Adventure of the Speckled Band. Below is the tableshowing the number of pronouns found in each language that we labeled as ‘true’ and‘false’ pronouns where ‘true’ are pronouns that are referential while ‘false’ pronouns
refer to the pronouns that are non-referential and are not the pronouns we are looking
for.
Language
EnglishMandarin Chinese
No. of False Pronoun
75
19
No. of True Pronoun
1370
1177
Total no. of pronoun
1445
1196
Table 4.1: Number of pronouns found in the two corpora

Japanese
51
463
514

Out of a total of 3155 pronouns found in the corpus, 94.8% is ‘true’ in English, 98.4%
is ‘true’ in Mandarin Chinese and 90.1% is ‘true’ in Japanese. As shown, among thethree languages, the English text has the most number of pronouns, followed by the
Mandarin Chinese text and then lastly the Japanese text but Mandarin Chinese has thehighest percentage of referential pronouns, followed by English and then Japanese.
The results for the linkage of the pronouns are separated into two parts for better
understanding – the first part being the results for the English-Chinese corpus and thesecond part for the results found from the English-Japanese corpus. Below is asummary for the number of links found for the pronouns in the English-Chinese
corpus.
Linked Pronouns
No. of features matched
5
6
7
8
5
19
54
789

Pronoun – NonPronoun
134

Non-Linked Pronouns
EnglishMandarin Chinese

9
No.
of
58
369
pronounTable 4.2: Summary of the linkage of pronouns in the English-Chinese corpus

215

There are in total 925 English to Chinese pronouns linked to each other, with 0.5% ofthem having only 5 pronoun features match, 2.1% having 6 pronoun features match,
5.8% having 7 pronoun features match, 85.3% having 8 features match and 6.3%
having 9 pronoun features match where 9 is the maximum match. The respective
pronoun features can be seen in Table 3.1 in the Methodology section. The majorityof the linked English-Chinese pronouns have 8 out of 9 matched features.
There are also 134 pronouns that are linked to non-pronouns. 76 of them are English
pronouns while 58 of them are Chinese pronouns. Out of the 1370 ‘true’ English
pronouns, 26.9% of them are not linked. For the Chinese ‘true’ pronouns, only 18.2%
were not linked to anything.
Also, according to the numbers, the bulk of ‘true’ pronouns are linked with 8 matchedfeatures, followed by pronouns which can only be found in one language whereby thishappens more frequently in the English source text as compared to its Mandarin
Chinese counterpart. After which, there was more than double for the pronouns that28

were found to match non-pronouns compared to pronouns which have 9 features
matching which preceded the pronouns having 7 matches, 6 matches and 5 matches
respectively.

In the English-Japanese corpus, the table below provides a summary for the numberof links found for the English and Japanese pronouns.
Linked Pronouns
No. of features matched
5
6
7
8
15
120
114
37

Pronoun – NonPronoun
139

Non-Linked Pronouns
EnglishJapanese

9
No.
of
32
943
pronounTable 4.3: Summary of the linkage of pronouns in the English-Japanese corpus

109

There are in total 318 linked English to Japanese pronouns. Out of these, 4.7% have 5matched features, 37.7% have 6 matched features, 35.8% have 7 matched features,
11.6% have 8 matched features and 10% have 9 matched features. The majority of thelinked English-Japanese pronouns, unlike the English-Chinese corpus, have around 6
to 7 matched features.
Similar to the English-Chinese corpus, there are 139 pronouns in the EnglishJapanese corpus that are linked to non-pronouns with English being more common forthis occurrence. 109 of the pronouns are English pronouns and the other 30 are
Japanese pronouns. In contrast to the English-Chinese corpus, the English pronouns in
the English-Japanese corpus that are not linked to anything accounts for 68.8% of the‘true’ English pronouns. For the Japanese pronouns, 23.5% of them are not linked toany English words in the English source text.
From the numbers seen, most of the pronouns in the English text are not linked,
meaning that they have no Japanese translation in the Japanese text. Comparable to
the English-Chinese corpus, the number of pronouns linked to non-pronouns in the
English-Japanese corpus has the second highest number. Pronouns, which have amatch of 6 features, came next, followed by pronouns that match 7 out of 9 features.
There are fewer Japanese pronouns that are not linked to any in the English source
text than those that match around 6-7 features. Pronouns that match almost
completely (8 out of 9 features) or those that match for all 9 features are infrequent.
The least of the pronouns checked, have matches of 5 features with each other.
Comparing the results found in the English-Chinese corpus and those in the EnglishJapanese corpus, there are a few similarities and more differences. The only two
similarities are that both have around the same number of pronouns that participatedin linkage to non-pronouns and have the least number of pronouns that match for 5
features. Other than these two similarities, the results found in the English-Chinese
corpus and the English-Japanese corpus are extremely different.

CHAPTER FIVE29

5. DISCUSSION
In this section, we will account for the differences in the number of pronouns found ineach language, discuss how they are linked in their respective corpus and also review
some interesting finds.
5.1 English has the most pronouns, followed by Mandarin Chinese and lastly
Japanese
As shown in the results above in Table 4.1, out of the three languages, English has themost number of pronouns, followed by Mandarin Chinese and then Japanese. However,
Mandarin Chinese has the highest percentage of referential pronouns, followed by
English and then Japanese. This is because English tend to use pronouns for more nonreferential purposes as compared to Mandarin Chinese such as having dummy ‘it’,existential ‘there’ and also complementizers like ‘that’ and ‘which’. Also, in English,
many pronouns can also double up as determiners (Collins, 2005). Determiners sharemany common words with pronouns such as ‘this’, ‘that’ and indefinite ones such as‘all’ and ‘some’. Whereas for Japanese, as stated above in the introduction, some of the
pronouns have other meanings and at times can be used as nouns. Also, being an
agglutinative language, Japanese marks their verbs (Backhouse, 1993) and different
particles can be used with a pronoun to produce different meanings altogether which
often do not function as pronouns anymore.
5.2 Differences in the pronoun linkage in both corpora
Between the English-Chinese corpus and the English-Japanese corpus, there were moredifferences than similarities. They differ in the number of linked pronouns and also in
the number of pronouns that are not linked. The first major difference found in the two
corpora is the percentage of English pronouns that have no translation. In the EnglishChinese corpus, majority of the English pronouns have translation in the Chinese text
but in the English-Japanese corpus, majority of the English pronouns have notranslation in the Japanese text. We expected the result for the English-Japanese corpus
but not for the English-Chinese corpus. This difference in number can be caused bymany reasons, some of which are discussed as follow.
Firstly, the way in which the three languages use pronouns can be a major factor in
determining that result. English uses pronouns frequently (Collins, 2005). Pronouns inEnglish can take the place of nouns in noun phrases and also to indicate the subject andobject of the sentence (Carter and McCarthy, 2006). Since English is an isolating
language, it seldom relies on inflection to give us the information we need to makesense of the referents the pronouns represent. Thus, a greater amount of pronouns isrequired in English to be able to properly express the referent. Other than personalpronouns having many different forms, English has other categories of pronouns thatboth Mandarin Chinese and Japanese do not have. For example, for the component
Negative, English has ‘none’ and ‘nothing’ which do not have identical correspondents
in Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. This is because both languages tend to use verbs to
express negativity instead of marking it in the pronoun like in (5a).

5a) English: but none commonplace
Chinese: 但是
却没有一 例 是 平淡无奇的Dan4shi4 que4 mei2you3 yi1 li4 shi4 ping2dan4wu2qi2 de‘But, there is no one case that is boring.’
Japanese: どれ も 尋常で はない 事件である
Dore mo jinjode wanai
jikendearu‘There is no unusual incident.’

30

In addition, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese are topic-prominent languages (Li andThompson, 1989; Obana, 2000). Once the topic is established, sentences following it
omit any pronouns, as there is no need for them to refer back as the readers can inferfrom contextual knowledge the subject of the sentence. The following example (5b)shows this:5b) English: My companion sat in the front of the trap, his arms folded, his hat pulled
down over his eyes, and his chin sunk upon his breast, buried in the
deepest thought.
Chinese: 我 的 伙伴
双
臂 交叉
地 坐
在 马车
的
Wo3 de huo3ban4 shuang1 bi4 jiao1cha1 de zuo4 zai4 ma3 che1 de前部， ∅ 帽子 耷
拉 下 来 遮住了 ∅ 眼睛，qian2bu4, ∅ mao4zi3 song3 la1 xia4 lai2 zhe1zhu4 le4 ∅ yan3 jing1,∅ 头 垂 到 ∅ 胸前， 深深
地 陷 入 沉∅ tou2 chui2 dao4 ∅ xiong1 qian2, shen1shen1 de xian4 ru4 chen2
思 之 中。
si1 zhi1 zhong1.
‘My companion folded (his) arms and sat in the front of the horse-drawn
carriage, (his) hat pulled down to cover (his) eyes, (his) head drooped to
the front of (his) chest, deeply in thought.’
Japanese: 我が 友 は、軽二輪 馬車 の 前 に 座って∅ 腕組み をし、Waga tomo wa, keinirin basha no mae ni suwatte ∅ udegumi o shi,
∅ 帽子を ∅ 目深 に かぶり、∅顎 を∅ 胸 に うずめて考え∅ boshi o ∅ mabuka ni kaburi, ∅ago o ∅mune ni uzumete
込んでいた。
kangaekonde ita.
‘My friend has (his) arms folded, sitting in front of a light twowheeled horse-drawn carriage, wearing (his) hat over (his) eyes, chinburied in his chest, deep in thought.
As can be seen in (5b), although English has stated the topic or the subject at the startof the sentence, it requires the possessive pronoun ‘his’ to refer back so that thereaders will know whose arm, whose hat, whose eyes etcetera. However, this is notnecessary in Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. With the topic stated at the start of thesentence, the following noun phrases do not require a possessive pronoun to indicate
its possessor.

31

Therefore, we did not expect the Mandarin Chinese text to have that many pronouns
since it is a topic-prominent language, but maybe due to the influence from theEnglish source text, the translator chose to employ more pronouns in the Mandarin
Chinese translation where it would be just as grammatically correct without them. As
seen in (5c) below, the number of pronouns in the English text and its Mandarin
Chinese correspondents are equal. However, the two first person pronouns after the
first clause in the Mandarin Chinese translation are actually not needed. Without thesepronouns, the sentence would still be grammatically correct (^Chinese).
5c) English: As I opened my door I seemed to hear a low whistle, such as my sister
described
Chinese: 就 在 我 开启房门时，我 仿佛听
到 一Jiu4 zai4 wo3 kai1qi3 fang2 men2 shi2, wo3 fang3fu2 ting1 dao4 yi4我 姐姐 说 的 那 样 的
声
轻轻
的 就 象
sheng1 qing1qing1 de jiu4 xiang4 wo3 jie3jie shuo1 de na4 yang4 de口哨
声
kou3shao4 sheng1‘Just when I was opening the room door, I seem to hear a soft whistle
just like what my sister said.’^Chinese: 就 在 我 开启房门时，Ø 仿佛听
到 一Jiu4 zai4 wo3 kai1qi3 fang2 men2 shi2, Ø fang3fu2 ting1 dao4 yi4
声
轻轻
的 就 象
Ø 姐姐 说 的 那 样
的sheng1 qing1qing1 de jiu4 xiang4 Ø jie3jie shuo1 de na4 yang4 de口哨
声
kou3shao4 sheng1‘Just when I was opening the room door, (I) seem to hear a soft whistle
just like what (my) sister said.’
Despite this, Mandarin Chinese and English do have similar pronouns that do notexist in Japanese. For example in (5d), the Entity, Universal pronoun ‘all’ has ‘一切
yi1qie4’ as its counterpart in the Mandarin Chinese text, but not in the Japanese text.
5d) English: and then all was silent once more
Chinese: 接着， 一切 又 都
沉寂 下来
Jie1zhe, yi1qie4 you4 dou1 chen2ji4 xia4lai2‘Then, all was silent again.’Japanese: また 静か に なり
Mata shizuka ni nari‘(It) became quiet again.’
Furthermore, out of the three languages, only Japanese marks politeness and someevidentiality on the verb (Backhouse, 1993), making the use of pronouns rather
unnecessary and this seems to play an important role in determining the much fewer
pronouns found in the corpus as compared to the English source text and Chinesetranslation text, resulting in the low rate of links to the English pronouns in theoriginal text. One example can be seen below in (5e):5e) English: I have heard of you, Mr. Holmes

32Japanese: あなた の こと は、以前 から お 聞き して います。
Anata no koto wa, izen kara o kiki shite imasu.
‘About you, (I) humbly heard previously.’
In the English text in (5e), there were two pronouns in the sentence. However, in theJapanese translation, only one pronoun was found which is ‘ あ な た anata’ incorrespondence to ‘you’ in the English text. The ‘I’ in Japanese is not needed as it isencoded in the verb ‘聞きして います kiki shite imasu’. This verb is a polite andformal way of saying ‘I have heard’ although it literally translates to ‘humbly heard’.
In this case, there is no need for the first person pronoun as the verb is used in asituation where the speaker respects the recipient and thus if ‘I’ was used, it would
seem too rude and not respectful as one of the politeness strategy in Japanese is to“avoid one’s direct reference to oneself” (Obana, 2000). Also, Japanese is a “speakeroriented” language (Obana, 2000), which means that constructions are done from the
speaker’s perspective and it is not necessary to refer to ‘I’. With the incorporation of
the meaning of ‘I’ in the verb, there is hence no need to use the pronoun in Japanese
to indicate the subject and at the same time, the speaker appears polite and respectful.
Between the English-Chinese corpus and the English-Japanese corpus, another majordifference is the number of corresponding features that majority of the linked
pronouns have. For the English-Chinese corpus, majority of the linked pronouns have
8 matching pronoun features while for the English-Japanese corpus, majority of thelinked pronouns have around 6 to 7 matching pronoun features. This is most likely
due to Japanese language having different speech levels (Obana, 2000). The different
speech levels cause a differentiation between the pronouns, resulting in Japanese
having a few different words for the same pronoun. For example, for the first person
pronoun, in Japanese there are variations such as ‘わし washi’ which also marks for
masculine and informal and ‘私 watashi’ which marks for formal and politeness.
These features do not exist in English but from the perspective of semantics, theyshould be linked to the first person pronouns in English. This problem does not exist
in Mandarin Chinese, as there is no such differentiation in speech levels in Mandarin
Chinese. Therefore, more features can be matched.
Also, from the linking of the pronouns, there were many cases where English
pronouns were linked to Mandarin Chinese and Japanese pronouns that are different
in meaning such as the third person pronoun ‘it’ in the English text to thedemonstrative pronoun ‘そこ soko that’ in Japanese. Although this happens in the
English-Chinese corpus as well, they are less frequent, thus resulting in more of the
pronouns linked have more matched features as compared to those in the EnglishJapanese corpus.
5.3 Deprominalisation occurs almost evenly in both the English-Chinese and EnglishJapanese corpora
As seen in the results, the number of pronouns matched to non-pronouns in the
English-Chinese corpus is around the same. This result is not expected as
deprominalisation was predicted to occur much more frequently in the English-33

Japanese corpus than in the English-Chinese corpus. This is because according to
Maynard, 1990 (cited in Gao, 2012) the use of pronouns is much more uncommon in
Japanese. Also, honorific forms, respective and polite ways of using the language ishighly valued in the culture. Therefore, to avoid being rude and disrespectful, forexample, instead of using pronouns to refer to people, usually their names or theirtitles are preferred. An example (5f) can be seen below, where ‘he’ was translated into
‘Holmes’:5f) English: He had ceased to strike and was gazing up at the ventilator
Japanese: ホームズ は 打ちつける の を 止めて、通気口 を 見上げた
Homuzu wa uchitsukeru no o tomete, tsukiguchi o miageta‘Holmes stopped striking and looked up at the vents’In (5f) above, the pronoun ‘he’ is linked to the name ‘Holmes’ instead of a pronoun.
However, since deprominalisation is rather equal for both corpora, it may be because
the Japanese translation was influenced by the English source text and thus used morecorresponding pronouns than usual to match the English source text.
5.4 Interesting cases foundFrom the tagging of the pronouns and their concept links, there were a few interestingcases that were found. In the English source text, we realized that pronouns often
exist in idiomatic phrases. However, these pronouns do not actually have any
particular antecedent to refer to as they are almost always used in the same way
regardless of its environment and this causes the linking of the pronouns to be
somewhat problematic.
5g) English: My God!
Chinese: 天 哪！
Tian1na‘Heaven!’Japanese: なんてこったい！
Nantekottai‘What the heck’
The above example shows that ‘my’ is used here as a pronoun in an idiomatic phrase
and after translation, no pronouns were seen. In both the Mandarin Chinese andJapanese text, their own version of an exclamation phrase here proves that pronouns
in idiomatic phrases cannot be easily defined.
Also, when translated to Mandarin Chinese or Japanese, usually there would be no
exact corresponding pronouns as the phrases are translated according to theiridiomatic meaning and not the literal meanings of the words.
5h) English: It is very kind of you.
Chinese: 非 常感 谢！
Fei1chang2gan3xie4‘Very grateful’Japanese: 感謝 して いるよKansha shite iru yo‘I’m grateful.’34

As seen in the example above, both the Mandarin Chinese and Japanese translated theEnglish source text in different ways. For the Mandarin Chinese text, its literalmeaning is ‘very grateful’ and can be understood as ‘thank you very much’ as well.
Whereas for the Japanese translation, it means ‘I’m grateful’. Although ‘grateful’ was
not inside the English text, the translators of the other two target languages took the
figurative meaning and translated according to that. Another example is shown below:5i) English: I assure you that I am in your hands.
Chinese: 我 向你保证， 我 一切听从
你 的 吩咐
Wo3 xiang4 ni3 bao3zheng4, wo3 yi2qie4 ting1cong2 ni3 de fen1fu4.
‘I promise you, I will obey all your instructions’Japanese: あなた の 手 に すべて を お ゆだね します わ
Anata no te ni subete o o yudane shimasu wa‘I will leave everything in your hands’
The Chinese translation here again chose to take the figurative meaning from theEnglish text (of the underlined phrase) and translated it to ‘I will obey all yourinstructions’. However, in the Japanese text, ‘your hands’ is translated directly to ‘あなたの手 anata no te’. This is actually uncommon in natural Japanese text and it ismost likely caused by the influence of the English source text.
Another interesting note was that other than pronouns, both Mandarin Chinese andJapanese tend to use classifiers anaphorically. Most often classifiers which are pairedwith numerals, interrogatives and determiners can be used as anaphors such as ‘那间na4jian1 (that+classifier)’ which can mean ‘that house/room’. Without the need of theproper noun in Mandarin Chinese, the determiner+classifier word can be used to referto a certain room, thus acting like a pronoun. Although classifiers are not as widelyused in English as in Mandarin Chinese and Japanese, numerals in English cansometimes take on anaphoric roles as well.
5.5 Limitations
As choice of words is largely affected by pragmatics, the use of pronouns can bevague at times and this proved it difficult to confirm whether the pronouns were used
as referential pronouns. Particularly in the English source text, there were a few casesof ambiguous pronouns and it was difficult to confirm them as a real pronoun. For
example in (5j),5j) English: They say that away down in the village, and even in the distantparsonage, that cry raised the sleepers from their beds.
The pronoun ‘they’ in the sentence seem to refer to a particular group of people,
however, it is actually not that simple. ‘They’ over here do not have a specific ortangible referent, instead it refers to something more general like the general public.

35

Another limitation to the study was that the corpora were segmented by POS andsome words were found to be segmented wrongly, leading to us not being able to tag
the pronoun. Following is an example (5k):5k) English: You see that we have been as good as our word
Chinese: 你瞧， 我们 是 说到 做 到 的Ni3qiao2, wo3men shi4 shuo1 dao4 zuo4 dao4 de4‘You see, we do what we say’In the Mandarin Chinese translation, ‘你瞧 ni3qiao2’ corresponds to ‘You see’ in the
English source text. However, due to the segmentation error, ‘你瞧 ni3qiao2’ wassegmented as a word and this disallows us to tag ‘你 ni3’ as a pronoun that can belinked to ‘you’ in the English text.
Also, due to the POS segmentation, semantics was not a point of consideration andsometimes this causes pronouns to be either tagged incorrectly or not be detected andthus not tagged. This problem can be solved with manual checking. However, it
proves to be a challenge for the auto-tagging programme to detect pronouns throughsemantic use.

CHAPTER SIX

36

6. CONCLUSION
A qualitative and quantitative approach was used in this research to study pronouns inparallel corpora across English, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. The results showthat pronouns, though universal, are used differently across languages, resulting in adifference in distribution among the three languages and a difference in the concept
links between the English-Chinese corpus and English-Japanese corpus. We have thenattempted to account for these differences and presented examples of some interestingcases.
However, the pronouns in this study are solely extracted from only one novel and thus
we cannot generalize the results across genres. Future work can compare other genresof texts such as non-fiction articles for their pronoun usage to see if the same results
can be produced. As stated in the methodology, preliminary work has already been
done on other genres of text such as an essay and on-line articles about Singapore
tourism. The results may differ for different genres of text. Additionally, texts withMandarin Chinese and Japanese as their source language can be looked at as well tocontrol for translationese.
Also, although pronouns are a closed class of words, many of them double up as
determiners. Other than the common determiners like ‘the’ and ‘a/an’, possessive,
demonstrative and indefinite pronouns can function as determiners as well. For
example, my car (possessive reference), this car (demonstrative reference), somepeople (indefinite reference). Future research can go into the study of these
determiners with their relation to pronouns and how they are used across the threelanguages.
With this study, we hope that translation issues regarding pronoun usage would be
useful and clearer to those who are learning the language and that the material fromthis study can contribute to pronoun translation across languages.

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