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

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FRANCESCA DEL GOBBO (5) a. The boys, who have frankly lost their case, should give up. b.* The boys that have frankly lost their case should give up. In Chinese, the insertion of a sentential adverb of modification yields ungrammaticality, in both cases of possible orders: (6) a.* Na-xie [RC shunbianshuo kaoshi shibai de] nanhai those incidentally exam fail DE boys zhuandao lingwai yi-suo daxue qu-le. transfer other one-CL university go-LE b.* [RC Shunbianshuo kaoshi shibai de] na-xie nanhai incidentally exam fail DE those boys zhuandao lingwai yi-suo daxue qu-le. transfer other one-CL university go-LE * ‘The boys that incidentally failed the exam transferred to another university.’ Ross (1967) maintains that quantified noun phrases cannot usually serve as antecedents of an appositive relative clause: (7) a. Every student that wears socks is a swinger. b.* Every student, who wears socks, is a swinger. In Chinese no difference arises if the quantifier precedes or follows the relative clause, as pointed out also by Lin (1997): (8) a. Mei-ge [RC chuan wazi de] xuesheng dou shi tiaowude. every-CL wear socks DE student all be dancers b. [RC Chuan wazi de] mei-ge xuesheng dou shi tiaowude. wear socks DE every-CL student all are dancers ‘Every student that wears socks is a dancer.’ Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (1990) argue convincingly that appositives are not presuppositions, but backgrounded assertions. More precisely, they maintain that the content of an appositive relative clause is a backgrounded component of what is being asserted, not of what is being presupposed. They show this by reasoning that the truth of an appositive relative clause is not taken for granted. In the case of a presupposition, instead, its assumed truth is a precondition for the felicitous utterance of the sentence and places a kind of constraint on discourse contexts that admit the sentence for interpretation. 290
CHINESE RELATIVE CLAUSES Consider the following examples (slightly modified from Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 1990): (9) a. That woman, who lost her luggage on the flight from Ithaca to New York, likes to travel by train. b. That woman, who lost her luggage on the flight from Ithaca to New York, doesn’t like to travel by train. c. Does that woman, who lost her luggage on the flight from Ithaca to New York, like to travel by train? d. If that woman, who lost her luggage on the flight from Ithaca to New York, likes to travel by train, she probably flies infrequently. e. That woman lost her luggage on the flight from Ithaca to New York. As Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (1990) point out, a sentence S presupposes p if S implies p and further implies that p is somehow already part of the background against which S is considered. In order for S to imply p, p needs to stay attached to S not only when it is asserted, but also when it is denied, questioned, or offered as a hypothetical assumption. This is what the P-family test does: (10) a. S b. It is not the case that S. c. Is it the case that S? d. If S, then S’. We can see from (9) that the appositive relative passes the implication tests: each of (9a-d) implies (9e), the content of the relative clause. But the appositive is not presupposed. In (9a) our assertion is articulated in two parts: a main assertion in the foreground and a secondary one in the background. To show that this is the case, Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (1990) embed (9a) in a context – provided in (11) – that does not take for granted the truth of (9e): (11) Let me tell you something about Jill Jensen, a woman I met while flying from Ithaca to New York last week. If we utter (9a) after (11), the result is felicitous. But this is not the case if after (11) we utter a sentence with the restrictive counterpart of the appositive in (9a): 291
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Chinese relative clauses: restrictive, descriptive or appositive? - Lear

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