ABSTRACT The present study is an attempt at a comprehensive presentation of various functions in the reference system of Mandarin Chinese. The study demonstrates that the reference system of Mandarin consists of a finite number of functions, some of which have not been identified as such, namely: absence of instructions to identify the referent, marked by bare nouns (sometimes analyzed as ‘indetermined’); presentation of an entity as not requiring identification (sometimes wrongly analyzed as ‘indefinite’); co-reference with the last coded participant in the event or a participant in the speech situation (not identified as such in the literature so far); obviative reference with respect to the last coded participant in the event (not identified as such in the previous literature); a referent that is located within the space and time of the environment of speech; and a referent within the domain of speech. The importance of this study lies in demonstrating that the analysis of forms and functions in a given language, as opposed to checking if and how categories observed in other languages are coded, allows for the discovery of categories that are encoded in the grammatical system and whose existence explains the forms of utterances in the language.

中文翻译：

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现代汉语参考系统

摘要 本研究试图全面介绍普通话参考系统中的各种功能。研究表明，普通话的指称系统由有限数量的功能组成，其中一些功能尚未被识别，即： 缺乏识别指称的说明，以裸名词标记（有时被分析为“不确定”）；将实体呈现为不需要识别（有时被错误地分析为“不确定”）；与事件中的最后一个编码参与者或语音情境中的参与者共同参考（目前文献中未确定）；关于事件中最后一个编码参与者的间接参考（在以前的文献中没有这样识别）；位于言语环境的空间和时间内的指称；和语音领域内的指称。这项研究的重要性在于证明对给定语言的形式和功能的分析，而不是检查在其他语言中观察到的类别是否以及如何编码，允许发现在语法系统中编码的类别及其存在解释了语言中的话语形式。