An Unbridgeable Gap? The Treatment of Definiteness Restrictions in French and Chinese Presentational Constructions

Availing ourselves of a parallel corpus – composed of two written and spoken subcorpora –, in this study we adopt a contrastive perspective to explore the (lack of) correspondence between French il y a-constructions with a definite pivot and Chinese yǒu-constructions. It is shown that most il y a-constructions appear in enumerative contexts (including the sentence-level and inter-clause list-reading, as well as the instantiation of an explicit part-whole relation). Written Chinese uses other strategies to ensure textual coherence and to mark a part-whole relation between the “pivot” and a given referential group (e.g., the lexical verb bāokuò “include”). In the spoken subcorpus, the yǒu-construction is the most frequent strategy which however competes with the locative shì “be” construction when a Ground is overtly expressed. Presentational and event-reporting il y a-constructions are mostly found in the spoken corpus and align more neatly with yǒu-constructions. Overall, the present study argues that the differences between the two languages are more nuanced than has so far been believed, showing that the correspondence between the cognitive status of referents and the formal marking of definiteness is not straightforward. Chinese pivots that are unmarked with respect to definiteness (e.g., bare nouns and bare-head noun phrases) can be semantically definite despite their postverbal position. At the same time, French definite pivots do not always denote identifiable referents, as is the case of the weak use of the definite article but also the special use of demonstrative determiners in topic-promoting and event-reporting contexts.