| Zero anaphors are widely used in Chinese discourse, and the fact that they can play any grammatical role and the intended antecedents may be present in any grammatical slot makes it difficult to interpret zero anaphors. Thus, the recovery of the referents of zero anaphors is traditionally believed to rely solely on pragmatic information. In this study, the Recovery Rules that are based upon the requirement of coherence of texts, discourse structure and lexical semantics of the vocabulary such as predicates and connectives in a piece of text in question are proposed to recover the referents of zero anaphors in Chinese discourse within the scope of a topic continuity.; The notion of topic continuity is defined with special regard to Chinese discourse structure; it is a coherent sequence of clauses sharing the same discourse topic and subsumed under the same macroproposition. This notion of topic continuity is argued to be the discourse unit within which zero anaphors can be appropriately interpreted, i.e., the antecedents of zero anaphors can be correctly recovered by the Recovery Rules. These Recovery Rules are developed on the basis of the analysis of about 800 topic continuities selected from the first eighty chapters of the Chinese classic novel, Hongloumeng, and the rules are tested against 210 topic continuities taken from the remaining forty chapters of the novel. The finding that the Recovery Rules accurately predict the intended referents of 95 percent of the zero anaphors found in the 210 topic continuities lends support to the assumptions of this study, i.e., it is possible to interpret Chinese zero anaphors depending on other than pragmatic information.; The Recovery Rules are not proposed to take the place of pragmatic information but intended to be an alternative theory for interpreting Chinese zero anaphors. They can be applied in teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and in translations between Chinese and other languages, such as English, in which the phenomenon of zero anaphor does not exist. |
