The Relative Position of Demonstratives and Relative Clauses in Mandarin Chinese
نویسنده
چکیده
In Mandarin Chinese there are two possibilities with regard to the relative order of relative clauses (RC) and demonstrative expressions (DM). A relative clause may either precede a demonstrative expression (RC+DM) or follow it (DM+RC). Traditionally, it is assumed that the latter is transformationally derived from the former by virtue of the movement of DM across RC. An investigation of a large Chinese corpus, the Lancaster Corpus of Modern Chinese (McEnery et al. 2003) (LCMC), however, reveals that the choice of the two different word orders is governed by semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic factors.
منابع مشابه
Subject Preference in the Processing of Relative Clauses in Chinese
A controversy in the sentence processing literature regarding relative-clause processing was raised by Hsiao and Gibson’s (2003) study of Chinese relative clauses. Their study suggested that, contrary to the patterns found in all other languages, Chinese relative clauses showed a processing preference for object extractions. This result posed a challenge to sentence processing theories that att...
متن کاملThematic orders and the comprehension of subject-extracted relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese
This study investigates the comprehension of three kinds of subject-extracted relative clauses (SRs) in Mandarin Chinese: standard SRs, relative clauses involving the disposal ba construction ("disposal SRs"), and relative clauses involving the long passive bei constructions ("passive SRs"). In a self-paced reading experiment, the regions before the relativizer (where the sentential fragments a...
متن کاملAmbiguity in the processing of Mandarin Chinese relative clauses: One factor cannot explain it all
This study addresses the question of whether native Mandarin Chinese speakers process and comprehend subject-extracted relative clauses (SRC) more readily than object-extracted relative clauses (ORC) in Mandarin Chinese. Presently, this has been a hotly debated issue, with various studies producing contrasting results. Using two eye-tracking experiments with ambiguous and unambiguous RCs, this ...
متن کاملThe comprehension of Relative Clauses within Movement-based hypothesis in L1 and L2: the Case of Tati and English
متن کامل
The De-marked Modification Structure in Mandarin Chinese
Over the years the nominal construction with marked modifiers in Mandarin Chinese, the so-called de construction, has been one of the most studied topics within the literature of Chinese linguistics. Due to its complicated properties and distributions, a satisfactory account has not yet been achieved that covers all the phenomena observed. In particular, the categorial status of de remains rath...
متن کامل