Connectionist Modeling of Experience-based Effects in Sentence ...

Chapter 2 Issues in Relative Clause Processing
structure is ‘V NO de NS’, where NO is the embedded object and NS the head noun
serving as the RC subject. Object relatives (example 9b) start with the embedded
subject and the object gap is assumed just before the relativizer. The general structure
is NS V de NO, where the head noun (NO) serves as the RC object.
The pre-nominal nature of Chinese RCs has three major structural consequences that
distinguish these constructions from RCs in English and other languages and hence
could lead to different theory predictions. The first difference is the position of the
gap. In English the filler-gap distance is shorter in the subject relative while the headfinal
nature of Chinese yields a shorter distance in object relatives. This and the fact
that the gap precedes the filler should make a difference for memory-based accounts
and gap-searching algorithms. Secondly, the head-final structure produces a temporal
ambiguity, especially in the Chinese ORC. In English the start of a non-reduced RC is
marked by a relative pronoun (e.g. that). In Chinese, because the relativizer follows
the RC, the reader is not necessarily aware of the RC while reading it. Initially, the
Chinese ORC has the form of a simple sentence. This should have consequences for
parsing and prediction. Finally, the canonicity properties of object and subject RCs is
swapped in Chinese. In contrast to English and other languages, where the SRC exhibits
the canonical word order, it is the ORC in Chinese which resembles the SVO word
order of simple sentences. Another consequence of the noun-preceding RC concerns the
complexity of deeper embedding. Interestingly, in Chinese an SRC embedding produces
the assumedly more complex center-embedding structure while ORC-embedding results
in an iterative linear structure.
(10) a. Doubly embedded SRC (Hsiao and Gibson, 2003):
[ei yaoqing [ej gojie faguan dej ] fuhaoj dei] guanyuani
gap invite gap conspire judge gen tycoon gen official . . .
V1 V2 N1 de1 N2 de2 N3
’The official who invited the tycoon who conspired with the judge. . . ’
b. Doubly embedded ORC (Hsiao and Gibson, 2003):
[[fuhao yaoqing ei dei] faguani gojie ej dej ] guanyuanj
tycoon invite gap gen judge conspire gap gen official . . .
N1 V1 de1 N2 V2 de2 N3
’The official who the judge who the tycoon invited conspired with. . . ’
As can be seen in the example (10), the doubly embedded SRC shows a recursive
center-embedding dependency between the head noun and the related gap. In the doubly
embedded ORC the dependency is linear. In the head-initial language English embedding
results in the opposite complexity properties.
Psychological Reality and Locality The semantic interpretation of the Mandarin
RC structure is the same as in other languages. However, their dramatic syntactic
difference from post-nominal RCs raises the question whether head-final constructions
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