Abstract
AbstractIn this article, which is taken almost verbatim from parts ofAgreement Beyond Phi(Miyagawa, Shigeru. 2017.Agreement beyond phi. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 75. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.), I focus on a puzzling observation about subjectproacross languages: in languages such as Japanese and those of Romance, the subjectprobehaves exactly like a pronoun in being able to freely refer to entities in the discourse with reasonable context, and also to refer sentence internally to a subject, an object, or other phrases. However, in Chinese, the subjectprois extremely limited in its reference potential: it is able to refer to a discourse entity in very narrow contexts, and sentence internally, its antecedent is limited to the subject. I show that the Chinese subjectprodemonstrates the principles of Strong Uniformity, by depending on ϕ-feature agreement for sentence-internal reference, and when that option isn’t taken, switches to the Topic feature to refer to a discourse entity.
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