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Abstract
This paper examines the interaction of DOM with information structure in Mandarin Chinese. Despite the large amount of works on this topic, much remains to be explained, in particular with respect to some alternations that do not easily fit the explanations proposed so far in terms of affectedness, animacy and definiteness. Through the analysis of text excerpts taken from the Corpus of Modern Chinese of the Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) of Peking University, we argue that, in addition to previously identified constraints, DOM in Mandarin Chinese performs another important function in discourse, namely that of signalling the high identifiability of the marked referent.
Published Online: 2014-3-13
Published in Print: 2014-3-1
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
