A Literature Review on Chinese Run-ons

Abstract

Since the term, Chinese Run-on Sentence (CRS for short), comes up firstly in Lu’s (1979, p.27) fundamental book Issues on Chinese Grammatical Analyses, many have cared deeply about it from multi-faceted aspects. However, early discussions proceed at a descriptive level without explicit elaboration of intricate facts within CRS, and some even stagnated, resulting from the complexity of CRS’s unique features, subject reference and logical relations as well as early scholars’ inclination to study CRS from Indo-European syntactic perspectives. Until Shen (2012), based on a very thought-provoking discussion of Chao’s (1968) minor sentences, reemphasizes the primacy of CRS, much headway of the recent past has been made. Given that, in the present article, there would be an attempt to depict the great accomplishments of the past. In our view, the researches dealing with CRS can fall into four parts: working definition, sentence categories, prosodic nature and structural properties, the details of which can be encapsulated as follows.