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Part of
Analysing Chinese Language and Discourse across Layers and Genres
Edited by Wei Wang
[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse 13] 2020
► pp. 11–36

Chapter 2
The distribution of null subjects in Chinese discourse

A centering approach

| The University of Auckland
Chinese is described as a null subject language, in that the subject of a clause can be unexpressed (covert). While a large amount of previous literature has focused on null subjects in isolated sentences, this study is concerned with null subjects in Chinese written narrative discourse within the framework of the Centering Theory. I examined the distribution of null subjects and their antecedents to explore the properties of null subjects, especially the relation between the function of null subjects and centering transitions. My hypothesis that the use of null subjects strongly relates to the CONTINUE transition is basically supported. Specifically, 96.48% are referential null subjects. Besides, I found that null subjects can also occur in other transition types, particularly in SMOOTH transitions (52.59%). The difference is that null subjects in CONTINUE transitions are overwhelmingly referential null subjects (96.48%), while they are non-referential null subjects (60.66%) in SMOOTH transitions.
Keywords: null subject 空主语, distribution 分布, Centering Theory 向心理论, Chinese discourse 汉语语篇
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The typology of null subjects in Chinese
    • Referential null subject
      • Anaphoric null subject
      • Obligatorily anaphoric null subject
      • Cataphoric null subject
    • Non-referential null subject
      • Deictic null subject
      • Inferable null subject
      • Arbitrary null subject
      • Existential null subject
  • Overview of centering theory
    • Centers
    • Transitions
    • Constraints and rules
      • Constraints
      • Rules
  • Specifying centering parameters in Chinese
    • Utterance
    • Discourse segment
    • Cf ranking
    • Rule 1
    • Rule 2
  • Corpus and method
  • Results and analysis: The distributions of null subjects and their antecedents
    • The distribution of null subjects
    • The distribution of antecedents
    • The distribution of null subjects by transition types
  • Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scld.13.02che
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