Chinese relative clauses: restrictive, descriptive or appositive? - Lear

FRANCESCA DEL GOBBO
(22) [DP RC [NP Γe [ RC N] ] ]
s-level i-level
This accounts for the ordering restrictions they observed and for the fact that
i-level relatives have the semantics of generics.
3.2. Chinese ‘descriptive’ relatives as generic modifiers
Since in Chinese nominal phrases are head-final, the structure in (21)
translates into the following structure:
(23) [DP β D β [NP Γe [α N] ] ]
Assuming (23) and a left-adjunction structure for Chinese relatives (see
Aoun and Li 2003, Del Gobbo 2003), we make two predictions. The first
prediction is that Chinese relatives preceding the demonstrative in D have a
deictic or s-level meaning, and Chinese relatives following the
demonstrative have either a deictic/s-level or a generic/i-level meaning. The
second prediction is that in Chinese we should find the same ordering
restrictions found in Korean and Japanese.
The first prediction is confirmed by the semantic difference that the
native speakers attribute to the example in (1) and (2), repeated below with
different translations as (24) and (25): 4
(24) na-ge [dai yanjing de] nanhai
that-CL wear glasses DE boy
‘that boy who wears glasses’ (preferred reading: generic/i-level)
(25) [dai yanjing de] na-ge nanhai
wear glasses DE that-CL boy
‘the boy that wears glasses’ (only reading: deictic/s-level)
In the example (24), the relative clause has a preferred generic or i-level
reading, even though it could also have a deictic/s-level one. 5 In the example
4 An anonymous reviewer points out that in Italian, as in other Romance and Germanic
languages, the demonstrative form questo, ‘this’, has a stronger deictic value than the form
quello, ‘that’. In Chinese, it seems that if we replace na-ge, ‘that’ with the corresponding
Chinese form for this, no semantic difference is attested, as far as the interpretation of the
relative is concerned.
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