Inter-Clausal Anaphora In Chinese

Chinese inter-clausal anaphora has been first observed by Chao (1968) as ‘a ratherstriking characteristic’ because the fronting of subject before the subordinate conjunctionis language-specific. Competing explanations exist, namely formal approach by C.-T.J.Huang (1982), pragmatic approach by Y. Huang (1991), combined approach by Tsao(1990/2005) and Xu (1995). So far, Xu’s description and explanation conforms to thedescription by Chao and Zhu which could be supported by empirical evidence. Headopted a topic-control approach which explains the co-reference pattern with topicality.According to Xu (1995) study, conditionals pose a problem for unifying the accountof Chinese inter-clausal anaphora. The present research provides better descriptions andmultiple explanations. Following the line of Xu, topic-control theory has been refined forexplanatory adequacy. First of all, there are semantic violation and phonological violationof topic-control corefernce principle: a. Zhangsanisuiran (Although) does not come, hejcomes.; b. Zhangsaniruguo (If) comes, hejwill also come.; c. Zhangsanisuiran (Although)does not come,[heF]jcomes. Secondly, a further semantic possibility is observed inyuqi…buru sentences: Yuqi heigo to Beijing, buru heigoes to Shanghai.; Thirdly,conditional Sentences prefer conjunction-initial structure all the time as the only groupparallel to English because of topicality of the conditional clause.As for desctiptive adequacy, quantitative corpus study is conducted with qualifiedsentences of25conditional coordinators randomly generated from the literature genreand the newspaper genre of CCL corpus. These samples are annotated with higher orderprogramming language designed by Xu. With the statistical findings in conditionals, realcorrelation pattern of Chinese inter-clausal anaphora manifest itself. A new tendencyaccount is provided which groups anaphoric patterns within each structure and stylisticfactor is identified in some exceptional cases.This dissertation is also an attempt of multiple solutions for the linguistic data ofinter-clausal anaphora in Chinese conditional sentences. More logical possibilities areexplored as tentative solutions: formal semantics, optimality syntax and bracketinganalysis. Formal semantics is relied on to generate logical descriptions of thecounterexamples. Optimality syntax illustrates the possibility of selecting the grammatical sentence with certain rankings of constraints from a processing perspective.Exhaustive interactions of the bracketing place and reference behaviour are described inthe final approach as a demonstration of applying mathematical models in linguisticanalysis.