Abstract
There is currently no consensus in the literature with the respect to the semantic status of relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese. Some authors (Zhang 2001; Del Gobbo 2003, 2004, 2005) claim that relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese can only be interpreted as restrictives; others (see Lin 2003) instead maintain that relative clauses in this language can be both restrictive and appositive. In this paper, I claim that Chinese relative clauses modifying proper names and pronouns can indeed be appositive, but they are still crucially different from appositive relative clauses in English. Following Cinque’s (2006a, 2008a) distinction between “integrated appositive relative clauses” and “non-integrated” ones, I claim that Chinese appositive relatives belong to the class of the “integrated” ones. I furthermore propose that the typological difference between the “integrated” appositives and the “non-integrated” ones is due to the absence versus presence of the relative pronoun. Adopting Cinque’s (2006a, 2008a) theory of relativization, I propose a structure for Chinese relative clauses whereby c-command of the internal head of the relative is disallowed. This explains why the internal head of the Chinese relative clause can never be generated as a relative pronoun and, more generally, why overt relative pronouns are unavailable in prenominal relative clauses cross-linguistically. Last, the theory here outlined makes the strong empirical prediction that no prenominal relative clause can be appositive in the canonical sense.
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Acknowledgments
For their comments and suggestions, I would like to thank Joseph Bayer, Anna Cardinaletti, Candice Cheung, Gennaro Chierchia, Guglielmo Cinque, Alexandra Cornilescu, Marcel den Dikken, Giuliana Giusti, Alex Grosu, Jim Huang and Audrey Li. My deepest thanks go to my consultants Grace Kuo, Ressy Ai, and Victor Junnan Pan. I am also thankful to two anonymous reviewers for providing insightful criticism, which led to significant improvement of the paper. All errors remain my sole responsibility. The research leading to this paper has been presented at the following venues: IsCLL-11, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan; National Taiwan Normal University and Fu Jen University, Taipei; CUNY Syntax Supper Talks, Graduate Center, CUNY, New York; the Annual Conference of the English Department, University of Bucharest, Romania; 15th IACL/19th NACCL Joint Conference, Columbia University, New York; and the Linguistics Department Research Seminar, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Del Gobbo, F. On Chinese appositive relative clauses. J East Asian Linguist 19, 385–417 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-010-9065-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-010-9065-9