Looking for someone: The encoding of indefinite human reference in Chinese/English aligned translation

Abstract

The existential-presentational construction yǒu rén [exist person] is the dominant strategy for encoding indefinite human reference in Chinese. In this sense, it is functionally equivalent to the indefinite pronoun someone, into which it naturally translates – especially in biclausal constructions (e.g., yǒu rén lái [exist person come] ‘someone is coming’). However, this equivalence is not always straightforward, as in some cases the “someone” translation is unavailable (e.g., yǒu rén shuō… [exist person say] ‘some people say…’). Our initial hypothesis posits that the interpretation of yǒu rén tends towards two prototypical meanings, Entity-referring and Kind-referring, each expected to exhibit a preferred alignment in translation. Using a parallel corpus of Chinese-to-English aligned novels, the analysis confirms alignment preferences for the two prototypes, in which the meaning of the referring expression (e.g., “someone” vs. “some people”) interacts with tense marking, specifically the nonpresent tense, and the co-occurrence of locatives in the aligned sentence, in bringing out Entity-referring interpretations. Additionally, findings indicate that preverbal subjects dominate in the aligned dataset, primarily due to the prevalence of biclausal constructions in the source subcorpus. It is argued that yǒu rén constructions are invariably anchored, either to spatiotemporal variables or to generic sets of entities. Despite their diversity, the situations they depict offer favorable contexts for the acceptance of discourse-new indefinite subjects in English. This also suggests, more broadly, that anchoring might in fact be the fundamental property of structures encoding indefinite human reference, not only in Chinese yǒu rén constructions but potentially across languages.