I just read the post on the Linguist List about identifying anaphora in Chinese. My comments here are not terribly relevant to the post, I think, but since there was mention of learners of Chinese, I thought I would throw in an experience I once had.
I studied Linguistics at the University of Michigan. I received my Masters in 1980. During my time there I took 2nd year Chinese. In that class, my teacher did a little experiment (I believe she was doing some research on English speakers learning Chinese) which involved our reading a short paragraph in Chinese. It was simple (it must have been because I remember understanding it !). At the end, we had to decide about a pronoun. Which character mentioned in the paragraph did a particular third person singular pronoun ("ta") refer to?
Well, every single native English speaker in the class chose one character, let's say Character A. The teacher then announced to us that it in fact refered to Character B. She surprised us all by saying that any native Chinese speaker (including those she had tested it on) would have agreed that it was B. We, in our English speaking world, had a lot of trouble believing this since it had been so obvious to us....
That was one of those many defining moments in my linguistic career; when I realized that too much talk about too much innateness and too much in the way of language universals is wasted talk. Each language builds a world that native speakers learn to live inside of. Acquiring a language is acquiring a world view and its assumptions.
I am curious about what your research leads to.
Sincerely,
Alan Pagliere