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- Title
Existential Coda Constructions as Internally Headed Relative Clause Constructions.
- Authors
Zhang, Niina Ning
- Abstract
Existential Coda Constructions in Mandarin Chinese (e.g. Ta jiao-guo yi ge xuesheng hen congming 'he taught a student, who was very smart.') contain post-nominal adnominal-like elements. Analyzing the syntactic structure of the constructions, I claim that the adnominal-like element and the modified nominal to their left form an internally headed relative clause, which is contained in the internal argument of the matrix verb. Facts of coordination, binding, the proform ye shi 'also be', and the topic-comment adjacency relation all support the constituency that groups the adnominal-like elements with their preceding nominals. Existential Coda Constructions are shown to exhibit a series of properties of relative clause constructions. Importantly, they pattern with internally headed relative clause constructions in the following aspects: the absence of any definite and strong indefinite marker, the scope of modification, the distinction from nonrestrictive relative clause constructions, and the Head status of the left-edge elements. I propose that the internal argument of an Existential Coda Construction is a nominal headed by a null D, the Spec of the D is a silent E-type pronoun, and the complement of the D is a CP. The apparent modified nominal is contained in the CP and is the antecedent of the pronoun. The relative clauseinternal position of the modified nominals is accounted for by the impossibility for non-bare indefinites to undergo topicalization. Finally, the constraint that the modified nominals cannot be bare is explained by the external null D licensing via N-to-D movement. The movement forces a bare noun to be out of a relative clause.
- Subjects
MANDARIN dialects; EXISTENTIAL constructions (Grammar); NOMINALS (Grammar); VERBS; FRAMES (Linguistics)
- Publication
Linguistics Journal, 2008, Vol 3, Issue 3, p8
- ISSN
1718-2301
- Publication type
Article