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

FRANCESCA DEL GOBBO
cases). I claim that the impossibility for Chinese relative clauses to be truly
appositive is ultimately due to the nature of appositive relative clauses,
which, according to the hypothesis put forth in Del Gobbo (2003), are
independent sentences (propositions of type t) and instances of E-type
anaphora.
2. Chinese relatives do not behave as appositive relatives
According to Chao (1968) and Hashimoto (1971), among others, 1 a relative
clause in Chinese is ‘descriptive’ if it follows a demonstrative, but it is
restrictive if it precedes it:
(1) na-ge [dai yanjing de] nanhai
that-CL wear glasses DE boy
‘that boy, who wears glasses’
(2) [dai yanjing de] na-ge nanhai
wear glasses DE that-CL boy
‘the boy that wears glasses’
Notice that the translations I used in (1) and (2) are indicative of the
assumption made when the above mentioned authors discuss the so-called
‘descriptive’ relative clauses. Even though they do not specifically mention
it, it is clear by the translations they use that by ‘descriptive’ they mean
‘appositive’. 2
1 Huang’s (1982) account of the facts in (1)-(2) is in terms of the scope of modification: if the
relative clause is in the scope of the demonstrative as in (1), the demonstrative is deictic, and
it fixes the reference of the ‘head’ of the relative clause. The relative clause is then used nonrestrictively.
But when the demonstrative is in the scope of the relative clause as in (2), it is
used ‘anaphorically’ onto the relative clause. And it is the relative clause, now restrictive,
which contributes in determining the reference of the ‘head’ noun. A terminological
clarification is due at this point. In the literature on Chinese, it is not always clear if a nonrestrictive
relative clause is an appositive relative clause. Huang (1982) explicitly says that his
use of the term ‘non-restrictive’ is different from the use of the same term to describe English
relative clauses. He uses the term ‘non-restrictive’ to mean that the relative does not specify
the reference of a preceding demonstrative.
2 The actual examples used by Chao (1968: 286) are:
(i) Na-wei dai yanjing de xiansheng shi shei?
that-CL wear glasses DE gentleman is who
‘Who is that gentleman (who incidentally is) wearing glasses?’
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