Abstract
In contrast to well-studied prenominal relative clauses (RCs) in Chinese, little has been known about postnominal RCs that are non-canonical but existent in spoken Chinese. Focusing on Standard Mandarin, this paper examines in a large-scale spoken corpus the distributional patterns of postnominal RCs. Using distribution patterns of prenominal RCs in existing corpus studies as benchmarks, we show that postnominal RCs in our spoken corpus of Standard Mandarin tend to modify sentential objects more frequently than sentential subjects, and that they are likely to be short, with extremely rare presence of aspect markers. Based on these patterns, we propose that postnominal RCs in Standard Mandarin are mostly afterthoughts, motivated by information structure of spoken languages and word order principles. To better understand their general coverage, we further investigate postnominal RCs in Chinese dialects using available resources, including Yue, Min, Xiang, and Wu, followed by a raw comparison of cross-dialectal similarities and differences. We conclude that postnominal RCs in Chinese are similarly motivated, but their degrees of grammaticalization vary.
Funding source: National Social Science Foundation of China
Award Identifier / Grant number: 20BYY160
Funding source: Shanghai Municipal Philosophy and Social Sciences Foundation
Award Identifier / Grant number: 2019BYY005
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions on the manuscript. Thanks also go to Rudolph Troike, Yicheng Wu and Zhiming Bao for commenting on the first version of our paper. We are also grateful for the feedback from the audience at the Workshop on varieties of adjectival modification, where some of this research was presented. Part of this research with a preliminary investigation of Standard Mandarin corpus was published in Yuyan Kexue (Linguistic Sciences). This research was supported by grants from the National Social Science Foundation of China (20BYY160) and Shanghai Municipal Philosophy and Social Sciences Foundation (2019BYY005).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Postnominal relative clauses in Chinese
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Postnominal relative clauses in Chinese
- Outlining a grammaticalization path for the Spanish formula en plan (de): A contribution to crosslinguistic pragmatics
- From connective construction to final particle: The emergence of the Korean disapproval marker hakonun
- Complex predicates, simple inflecting verbs, and “uninflecting verbs” in Pre-Basque
- What makes up a reportable event in a language? Motion events as an important test domain in linguistic typology
- Words are constructions, too: A construction-based approach to English ablaut reduplication
- Oblique nominals, a verbal affix and late merge
- Experimental evidence supporting the overlapping distribution of core and exempt anaphors: Re-examination of long-distance bound caki-casin in Korean
- Reassessing the third person pronominal “copula” in spoken Israeli Hebrew
- Domain restriction in child Mandarin: Implications for quantifier spreading
- Nouns and verbs in the speech signal: Are there phonetic correlates of grammatical category?