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Studies in Language
Vol. 48:2 (2024) ► pp.351–389

Comparing zero and referential choice in eight languages with a focus on Mandarin Chinese

ORCID logo | University of Freiburg | Australian National University
Mandarin has a low rate of overtly expressed arguments in all syntactic functions without agreement marking on the verb. It has been claimed that Mandarin exhibits higher rates of zero arguments than other languages. Most previous work has compared Mandarin with English, while comparison with other languages remains a desideratum. This study compares Mandarin with seven languages (Cypriot Greek, English, Northern Kurdish, Sanzhi, Teop, Tondano, Vera’a) taken from Multi-CAST (Haig & Schnell 2019). Results suggest that while Mandarin exhibits more zero arguments than pronouns, this is not unique, with e.g. Cypriot Greek having a higher rate of zero arguments. In addition, a relatively stable rate of lexical expressions can be found across languages, relativising Mandarin’s unique position with regard to referential choice even further.
Keywords: Mandarin Chinese, zero arguments, corpus analysis, usage-based approach, referential choice
Article outline
  • 1.Is Mandarin discourse less explicit?
  • 2.Zero arguments and verb agreement
  • 3.Analysing zero arguments using Multi-CAST
    • 3.1Multi-CAST: Multilingual corpus of annotated spoken texts
    • 3.2Overview of the languages
      • 3.2.1Cypriot Greek
      • 3.2.2English
      • 3.2.3Northern Kurdish
      • 3.2.4Sanzhi
      • 3.2.5Teop
      • 3.2.6Tondano
      • 3.2.7Vera’a
      • 3.2.8Mandarin
    • 3.3Comparability of the eight languages
  • 4.Coding of the Mandarin corpus
  • 5.Results of the usage-based analysis
    • 5.1Rates of zero arguments across languages
    • 5.2Finer-grained analysis of underlying causes
      • 5.2.1Preliminary nature of this analysis
      • 5.2.2Included variables and languages
      • 5.2.3What decision trees are and how they are computed
      • 5.2.4Preliminary results and discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Data availability
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 1 September 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.21072.vol
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