Hello,

In my PhD thesis on referent introductions in Chinese and French, both as L1s and L2s, I'm writing a section about the tendency (more or less strong) generally observed across languages to avoid preverbal indefinite subjects.

I've consulted some corpus-based studies, as, for instance, Francis et al. (1999) on English, Cappeau (2008) on French, Sornicola (1995) on Italian and Hasselgård (2018) on Norwegian.

Now I'm looking for a study about preverbal indefinite subject in Chinese on the basis of corpora results (both spoken and written corpora, even if I'm mainly interested in the spoken register).

Is anyone working on this subject and/or could you recommend me a reference?

Thank you a lot!

All the best