Discourse functions of ránhòu 然后 and overtness requirement for subjects: A corpus-driven formal account

This paper proposes an analysis of overt and null subjects in sentences in which the Chinese connective 然后 ránhòu ‘then’ is used as a temporal conjunction (CJ) or a discourse marker (DM). Following a corpus-driven approach, we collected 192 occurrences of ranhou from a 2.5h randomly selected sub-corpus of telephone conversations between native speakers of Chinese. Statistical results show that (i) ranhou is used more often as a DM than as a CJ and that (ii) the subject following the DM is mostly overt, even in cases when the topics in the two clauses connected by ranhou are the same. Our syntactic interpretation of the result is that, when used as a DM, ranhou sits in a functional domain above the clause, whereas, when used as a CJ, it is adjoined to VP. In conclusion, we propose subject/topic overtness as a significant feature in making a distinction between CJ and DM ranhou.