On Indefinite Subject NPs in Chinese

Most Chinese linguists agree that indefinite NPs cannot occur in the sub-ject position in Chinese sentences. However, this concept is quite vague and needs further specification. In Chinese, indefinite NPs do take the subject role when they are licensed with an existential syntactic marker. On the other hand, bare nouns without the syntactic marker can appear as the subject in a sentence but are interpreted differently in different sentence types. This paper observes that the indefinite subject NPs in Chinese are actually non-definite reference NPs, which includes indefinite, specific, and generic NPs