Abstract
The present study explores the use of zero anaphor in discourse from a cognitive-functional perspective. Although zero anaphora is commonly considered to be a dividing parameter of linguistic typology between languages like Chinese and English, the study argues that it is a discourse phenomenon that manifests highest degree of cognitive accessibility and figures prominently in coding topicality and signaling maximum coherence in discourse processing. The study proposes a general zero-anaphor principle and demonstrates that, using text data from Chinese and English, zero anaphora is indeed a function of topicality and thematic coherence, and its use in discourse is remarkably similar between these two languages that are considered typologically very different.
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