Inter-Clausal Anaphora in Chinese: The Case of Conditionals

This book offers a comprehensive and multi-faceted examination of Chinese inter-clausal anaphora, with a particular focus on conditional sentences. Building upon the foundational observations of Yuen Ren Chao (1968) and subsequent competing explanations, this book aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of this language-specific phenomenon.

This work uniquely bridges descriptive and explanatory adequacy, offering both a detailed account of the patterns observed in Chinese inter-clausal anaphora and a range of potential explanations for these patterns. By complementing formal linguistic analysis with quantitative methods and exploring connections to different theoretical approaches, this book provides a comprehensive and innovative perspective to understanding a complex linguistic phenomenon.

Shunting Chen is a lecturer at Shanghai International Studies University, specializing in semantics, corpus linguistics, and contrastive linguistics. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Shanghai International Studies University and was a visiting researcher at Harvard and the Laboratory of Formal Linguistics (Paris Diderot University and CNRS). She has published extensively on Chinese inter-clausal anaphora and conditional sentences, combining corpus-driven approaches with formal linguistic theories. She has received multiple research grants, including the Youth Fund for Humanity and Social Science Project by the Ministry of Education, and serves as a reviewer for Cognition and Sage Open.