Recovery and translation of zero anaphoric subjects in Chinese
type: CreativeWork
description: In reading a narrative, it is crucial to know who the writer is referring to. When the subject of each sentence is made explicit, this task of identifying the referent is simple. However, in a discourse-oriented language like Chinese, there is no grammatical requirement to have a subject in each sentence, and so zero subjects are the norm rather than the exception. There could be several entities present in a discourse made up of clauses with zero subjects. The reader will have to decide which entity is being referred to in each clause. The first part of this dissertation examines the cues that help readers identify the correct referent; the second part investigates how these zero subjects are translated into English where the subjects are usually made explicit.
abstract: In reading a narrative, it is crucial to know who the writer is referring to. When the subject of each sentence is made explicit, this task of identifying the referent is simple. However, in a discourse-oriented language like Chinese, there is no grammatical requirement to have a subject in each sentence, and so zero subjects are the norm rather than the exception. There could be several entities present in a discourse made up of clauses with zero subjects. The reader will have to decide which entity is being referred to in each clause. The first part of this dissertation examines the cues that help readers identify the correct referent; the second part investigates how these zero subjects are translated into English where the subjects are usually made explicit.
author: Lee, Cher-Leng
language: eng
keywords: Language, Linguistics, Literature, Asian
date published: 2011-05-07T13:15:30Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:25:18Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/21666