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Postnominal relative clauses in Chinese

  • Fang Wang and Fuyun Wu EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 13, 2020

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.


Corresponding author: Fuyun Wu, School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dongchuan Road, Minhang District, Shanghai 200240, P. R. China, E-mail:

Funding source: National Social Science Foundation of China

Award Identifier / Grant number: 20BYY160

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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Published Online: 2020-11-13
Published in Print: 2020-11-25

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