Grammatical Roles of the Head Noun in Chinese Relative Clauses

Combination of grammatical roles in relative clauses (RC) is determined by a multitude of factors (Fox and Thompson 1990, Pu 2007, Ming and Chen 2009). This study shows that four factors (discourse functions of RCs, grounding mechanism, information status, and animacy of head nouns) interact with one another to determine which combination is favored in a Chinese discourse. 1. Introduction The past two decades or so have witnessed an increasing number of analyses on relative clauses (RC) demonstrating that distribution and structural properties of RCs can be attributed to a multitude of factors such as information flow in discourse, information status of head nouns, humanness of head nouns, discourse functions of RCs etc Functional-pragmatic analyses on linguistic structures in general and on RCs in particular demonstrate that linguistic structures arise from the discourse need and there is an isomorphic relation between syntax and pragmatics. The object of this study is to show that the distribution of Chinese RCs and the combination patterns of grammatical roles of their head nouns can be approached from a semantic-pragmatic perspective by examining the interaction between the semantic properties of the head noun and discourse functions of their modifying RCs. It also seeks to explain what motivates language users to use a particular type of relative causes (RC) to modify a particular type of head nouns (NP). Chinese RCs, unlike their English counterparts, always precede their head NPs. The following are several examples where the head noun is italicized and the relativized noun inside the RC is spelled out as a zero (i.e.∅). For our purpose, three grammatical roles are distinguished: subject (S), object (O), and others (X). We first discuss the grammatical of the relativized head NP inside the RC. Subject RC is used to name RCs where the relativized head noun is the subject of the RC, object RCs to name RCs in which the relativized head NP functions as the object of the RC and X RCs refer to a RC whose head NP does not serve as the core argument of the RC, i.e. neither subject role nor object role. Object RC, subject RC, and X RC are exemplified in (1a), (1b), and (1c) respectively.