Notes and discussions
Remarks on gapless relative clauses and complement clauses in Mandarin Chinese
Haihua Pan | The Chinese University of Hong Kong
This paper makes remarks on the syntactic status of Gapless Relative Clauses (GRCs) in Mandarin Chinese and shows
that the arguments for their complement status are not supported by the facts in Mandarin Chinese, as almost all the arguments for
the complement clause analysis of GRCs, as presented in Huang (2016), could be argued
to be evidence for the relative clause (RC) analysis of GRCs. The following RC recoverability hierarchy, Argument RC > Adjunct
RC > GRC, is proposed to explain the contrasts discussed in Huang (2016) and this
paper, and the relevant facts and differences could be accounted for if one assumes that the RCs further to the right in the
hierarchy above are more difficult to be recovered than the RCs further to the left in the above hierarchy and should thus occur
closer to the head noun. This paper demonstrates that GRCs are really RCs licensed by a covert semantic variable, and suggests
that the gapless requirement on complement clauses be replaced by the following two conditions: (a) no syntactic gap or semantic
variable exists in the relevant clause that is related to the head noun in question and (b) a semantic condition, to be specified
in this paper, is necessary on the relationship between the clause in question and the modified head noun.
Keywords: Chinese, syntax, relative clauses, complement clause, semantics
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.
Huang’s (2016) arguments and their limitations
- 2.1Word order
- 2.2Subcategorization
- 2.3The distribution of Suo ‘所’
- 2.4Coordination
- 2.5Iteration
- 2.6Long distance extraction
- 2.7N′ ellipsis
- 2.8Nominalization
- 3.GRCs are RCs licensed by a semantic variable
- 4.RC recoverability hierarchy
- 5.Conditions on NC clauses
- 6.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
-
References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
References
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