Revisiting Chinese indefinite subjects – a comparison with English

Abstract

This paper defines the necessary and sufficient conditions for the licitness of indefinite subjects in Mandarin Chinese. The primary thesis is that their distribution is governed by two distinct but interacting principles. First, we posit, drawing upon Chierchia (1995. Individual-level predicates as inherent generics. In G. N. Carlson & F. J. Pelletier (eds.), The generic book , 176–223. University of Chicago Press), that Davidsonian arguments – both in stage-level and individual-level predicates, can be formally constrained to function as existential stage topics or generic situation topics. The presence of such a topic can license an indefinite subject, satisfying the discourse requirement for a sentence to have a topic as its starting point. Second, we further argue that the felicity of a Chinese indefinite subject also depends on a legitimate topic-comment structure, as defined by the topic- licensing condition from Pan and Hu (2008. A semantic–pragmatic interface account of (dangling) topics in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics 40(11)). This condition requires a non-null intersection between the sets denoted by the topic and the comment. The well-formedness of a Chinese indefinite subject is thus shown to be contingent not only upon the availability of a suitable discourse topic but also upon the licit semantic integration of the topic-comment structure itself.