Chinese bare nouns in the anaphora: comparison between Spanish and Chinese

Abstract

This paper analyzes Chinese bare nouns in the anaphora and makes a comparison between Spanish and Chinese. The interlingual comparison allows us to understand better the particularity of Chinese bare nouns as well as their behaviors in the anaphor. The paper concludes that as the definite article in Spanish, the bare nouns in Chinese can be used in the direct anaphora and associative anaphora. In Chinese, the direct anaphor with bare nouns is safe. However, the security also involves their limitation: lack of formal variety. In anaphoric uses, the article in Spanish decides the expectation of relevance in this language: the uniqueness is expected to be satisfied. In Chinese, a language that is characterized by the absence of the article, the expectation of relevance is different: it is expected to achieve a relevant conceptual interaction between the new information and the old one.