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Inter-clausal Anaphora in Chinese Conditionals: a Multi-factorial Analysis

Chinese inter-clausal anaphora, as in Wo suiran xiang facai, keshi bugan maoxian. ‘I although want to get rich, yet don’t dare to take risks’ is considered ‘rather striking’ (Chao, 1968) because of the way the subject can be fronted or not, which might come from reference patterns of the two clausal subjects. Previous corpus investigations (Xu (1995), Chen (2016), and others) have suggested a direct relationship between reference patterns (disjoint reference or co-reference between the two subjects) and the position of the subject. The present study explores other factors that might play a role in predicting the structure patterns. Corpus data for 25 conditional subordinators are grouped according to logic relations from Huang and Liao (2002). 8007 sentences were subject to the final statistical analysis, performed employing logistic regression models. In this model, it is found out that in predicting structure, the genre Newspaper is less likely than Literature in getting fronted structure; disjoint reference pattern is less likely to indicate fronted structure than conjoint reference pattern; NP in the first clausal subject position is more likely to be associated with fronted structure than other pronouns or wh-pronouns or personal pronouns; NP in the second clausal subject position is more likely to result in fronted structure than personal pronouns but less likely than zero pronouns in the same place; fronted subject in clause two is more likely to lead to fronted structure than un-fronted one. Motivations include topicality, accessibility, and others. Such model is possibly applicable to other types of interclausal anaphora.