Generic pronouns in Mandarin Chinese

Although genericity is a widely and extensively explored phenomenon cross-linguistically
over the past few decades, there are comparatively fewer studies on generic pronouns,
among which the nature and behaviour of generic pronouns in Mandarin Chinese awaits
more attention.
There are three types of generic pronoun in Chinese, based on Holmberg and Phimsawat’s
(2015) definition of such pronouns. These are: the inclusive generic pronoun
ren ‘one’ or ni ‘you’, referring to people in general including the speaker, the addressee
and others; the quasi-inclusive generic pronoun women ‘we’, referring to people in a
restricted period or region, including the speaker and associates without the addressee
or others; and the exclusive generic pronoun tamen ‘they’ referring to certain group
of others in a restricted time period or geographical region, excluding the speaker, the
addressee or both sides’ associates. Chinese generic pronouns may be overt or covert,
including the forms above, as well as pro and PRO. Ren has different interpretations
ranging over kind, inclusive generic, and referential ones.
I propose a dual operator system for my analysis (cf. Dobrovie-Sorin, 2001), with one
generic operator binding DPs and the other binding event variables. Each of the two
generic operators competes in principle with existential, universal or other quantificational
element of a similar type.
My goal is to clarify the interpretations of the different pronouns according to their linguistic
and contextual environments. As Chinese is a language without agreement and
inflection, contextual information is very important in restricting the interpretation(s)
of DPs. The (c)overtness of the generic pronouns mainly depends on contextual factors
and cannot simply be derived from their syntactic phi-features (as was proposed for
Thai by Holmberg and Phimsawat (2015)).
Through this research, I aim to provide an overview of the interpretation and distribution
of generic pronouns in Mandarin Chinese at the interface of syntax, semantics
and pragmatics. I hope to fill the gap in the studies of Chinese genericity, and further
contribute to the investigation of pronouns among pro-drop languages.