The Definiteness Effect in Mandarin Chinese: A Critical Narrative Review of Marking Devices, Existential Constructions, and Acquisition

Abstract

Mandarin Chinese lacks morphological articles, yet speakers reliably distinguish definite from indefinite reference through word order, nominal form, and discourse context. This review critically synthesises the theoretical, corpus-based, and acquisition literature on the definiteness effect in Mandarin, understood both as the classic restriction against strong determiners in postverbal position under the existential verb you and, more broadly, as the set of regularities governing definite and indefinite interpretation across bare nouns, demonstrative phrases, and classifier phrases. The review traces the position-based account associated with preverbal and postverbal asymmetries, evaluates competing syntactic and semantic analyses of bare-noun definiteness, and examines the unresolved dispute between accounts that treat Mandarin demonstratives as obligatory markers of anaphoric definiteness and accounts that admit optionality conditioned by discourse coherence. Evidence from corpus-based and experimental studies of the you-existential construction is weighed against claims, originating in the pragmatic literature, that the definiteness effect is a derivative of information-structural constraints rather than a grammatical primitive. The review further considers first-language acquisition data on children’s interpretation of bare and demonstrative nominals, second-language and heritage-speaker evidence on the acquisition of definiteness marking, and cross-dialectal comparisons with Cantonese, Wu, and other classifier languages that illuminate the typological status of the Mandarin pattern. Methodological strengths and limitations of the reviewed literature are assessed, including the reliance on constructed judgement data, the scarcity of large-scale corpus quantification, and inconsistent operationalisation of definiteness across studies. The review identifies persistent disagreement over whether Mandarin definiteness is regulated primarily by syntax, semantics, or discourse pragmatics, and proposes that convergent psycholinguistic and corpus evidence, rather than further theory-internal argumentation alone, is required before the competing accounts can be adjudicated.