Anaphoric demonstratives in Mandarin

The goal of this study is to experimentally evaluate contrasting claims in the theoretical literature on the acceptability of Mandarin demonstratives and definite bare nouns in anaphoric contexts. Jenks (2018) argues that Mandarin differentiates between uniqueness-based (weak) and anaphoric (strong) definites through bare nouns and demonstratives, respectively. In contrast, Dayal & Jiang (2022), Bremmers, Liu, van der Klis & Le Bruyn (2022), and Simpson & Wu (2022) claim that both bare nouns and demonstratives can be used in anaphoric contexts in Mandarin, proposing slightly differing explanations with regards to their felicity, tied to factors such as discourse coherence between context and follow-up sentences. Our findings illustrate that Mandarin demonstratives are strongly preferred across the board in anaphoric contexts, patterning with anaphoric definites (rather than demonstratives) in languages such as English, Turkish (Saha, Sa˘g & Davidson 2023), and Bangla (Saha 2023). Additionally, we observe that definite bare nouns are also felicitous in anaphoric contexts, albeit as a less preferred option. We argue that this preference for demonstratives arises because Mandarin bare nouns can have (i) generic interpretations due to the absence of tense and aspectual marking, and (ii) indefinite interpretations in post-verbal positions (Cheng & Sybesma 1999; Simpson & Wu 2022). Demonstratives, by contrast, are unambiguously anaphoric, driving their overall preference.