In modern Standard Mandarin, the fundamental discourse function of the generic sentence “yige ＋NP” when serving as the subject （or topic） is to express the discourse stance, which is often used to convey “epistemic stance” and “evaluation stance.” And the generic sentence “yige ＋NP” is used to express the discourse stance by speakers for two main pragmatic purposes： The first is to broaden the inferential scope of the speaker’s statements and to enhance the speaker’s personal stance; The second is to establish a shared belief sys...
