Lecture | CHiLL series
Labeling reduced clauses in Chinese
- Date
- Wednesday 18 December 2024
- Time
- Serie
- Chinese Linguistics in Leiden (ChiLL)
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.35
Abstract
There is a general debate concerning “reduced” clauses. Regarding the question-answer pair in (1), the sentential approach (Morgan 1973; Merchant 2004) would argue that the answer involves a full clause, which has undergone ellipsis/deletion. On the contrary, the non-sentential approach (base-generation) approach argues that they are originally built as reduced (Barton 1990; Progovac 2006, 2013).
(1) Question: Who is coming to dinner?
Answer: Tom./Your neighbor./No one./Me. / ??? I (Progovac 2013)
Cecchetto & Donati (2022) argue that certain types of sentences in Italian are reduced clauses with full force specification. Along this line, we propose that certain simple “subject-predicate” sentences with unaccusatives and ergatives in Chinese are reduced clauses, in particular, bare noun reduced clauses, as shown in (2).
(2) a. Qíjì chūxiàn le.
miracle appear SFP
‘The miracle has appeared.’
b. Wèntí jiějué le.
problem solve SFP
‘The problem has been solved.’
Evidence will be provided to show that these sentences may not involve higher syntactic spine like TopicP, TP and vP. Different from Cecchetto & Donati (2022), we argue that PhiP (traditional TP, <φ, φ> in reduced structure) alone may not encode illocutionary force, which is licensed via a force head C.
Biography
Zetao XU is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), supervised by Victor Junnan Pan (CUHK) and Roberta D'Alessandro (Utrecht University). Currently, he is on exchange at Utrecht University. His PhD Topic aims to investigate contact-induced syntactic changes of resumptive pronouns in heritage Chinese. His research interests also involve the syntax of Chinese and Wu dialects, Indigenous languages in western China (nDrapa), and bilingualism.