A STUDY OF NOMINAL-CLAUSAL RELATIONS IN MANDARIN CHINESE

Abstract

This dissertation reexamines a variety of prenominal clauses in Mandarin Chinese and provides a simpler, more comprehensible, and less chaotic view of the nominal-clausal relations. In particular, it is argued that gapless clauses (a.k.a. "gapless relative clauses"), and content clauses (a.k.a. "complement clauses") should be treated on a par with adjunct relative clauses, all of which contain an adjunctivizer selecting a phonetically empty nominal operator as its complement. Unlike in the argument relative clause construction, the head nominal modified by these adjunctive clauses cannot be identified as any argument of the predicate in the clause. The adjunctivizer performs the function of relating the head nominal to an adjunct in the eventuality of the gapless clause or the proposition of the content clause. The empty operator then moves to the periphery of the clause so that the clause can be locally predicated of the nominal to be modified. The adjunctivizers in adjunct relative clauses introduce what can be regarded as conventional adjuncts, i.e., location, time, instrument, manner, and reason, whereas the adjunctivizers in gapless clauses and content clauses introduce unconventional adjuncts (and hence have not been regarded as adjuncts in previous literature), such as cause, effect, attribute, component, degree, and content. I also explore the idea that the adjunctivizers may be underspecified and their values are ultimately determined in consultation with the pragmatics associated with the utterance. This dissertation argues against the previous claim that gapless clauses should be treated along with content clauses as the complement of the head nominal by showing that the alleged syntactic and semantic evidence is either problematic or insufficient. It will also provide syntactic arguments for the operator movement, the landing site of operator and its association with the head nominal, and the nominal status of operator. In addition, it will offer formal semantic derivations reflecting such syntactic analyses for the different kinds of prenominal clauses. The proposed approach revises and extends previously proposed similar but distinct notions of adjunct operators, pointing out their shortcomings.