A study of discourse anaphora, anaphora in discourse that is not controlled syntactically, looks at the three types of such anaphora in Chinese: pronominal, nominal, and zero. The analysis focuses on the type of coreference in which the antecedent and the anaphor occur in clauses that occur adjacent to each other in linear order. In such clauses, it is presumed that function is irrelevant. It is argued that this approach is not adequate to describe and predict anaphoric distribution because its inherently linear view of texts does not differentiate between the functions of the parts of the texts. A discourse-structure oriented approach, the rhetorical predicate analysis, is proposed as an alternative. (MSE)