Zero Anaphora Errors and the Restriction Rules of Zero Anaphora in Discourse for Middle and Senior International Students

Zero anaphora is an important form of textual cohesion in Chinese. However, there have been few previous studies on zero anaphora errors, and the analysis of the causes of zero anaphora errors has been too general, which is not suitable for teaching purposes. As a result, most international students are unsure about when to use zero anaphora. To help international students better understand and master zero anaphora, we selected 50 compositions written by international students from the HSK Dynamic Composition Corpus and annotated them. Based on the labeling results, zero anaphora errors are classified into two types: lack of zero anaphora and overuse of zero anaphora. Among these, the overuse of zero anaphora can be further categorized into two subtypes: topic missing due to overuse of zero anaphora and reference errors due to overuse of zero anaphora.In addition, we have also observed the limitations of zero anaphora in discourse by analyzing the errors made by international students, and fully explored its lexical and semantic features to provide more targeted guidance for their writing.