LADChineseRelatives

Some issues raised in analysing Chinese Relative Clauses

ZhenzhenFan (FrancisBond)

We sketch an outline of how we handle relative clauses in Chinese, show that the simplest analysis calls for fewer quantifiers and suggest some strategies for dealing with this.

This is the third Virtual Linguistic Analysis Design Session. It will be held on Wednesday, March 1, 2016 at 00:00:00 UTC/GMT (Seattle 4pm (Tue), Singapore 8am, Berlin 1am)

Details on Overleaf.

1. Introduction We started with a seemingly unambitious task in building Zhong grammar - to model the relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese. Soon we found that we also need to cover other usages of DE. And finally we can’t run away from re-examining the implementation of NP structure in Zhong. 1Hence the need of this VLAD to gather more support in terms of linguistic analysis, HPSG implementation, as well as, moral support. The following topics will be discussed:1. Relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese and the general implementation in Zhong 2. The dilemma of determiner (SPR) in NP 3. Can we adopt a different approach? - Allow unspecified NP and use transfer rule to fix the semantics 4. Clarification seeking: LIGHT +/- as constraint to indicate word/phrase

2. Chinese Relative Clauses
2.1 Brief Overview One of the elements that can occur before a noun in a Chinese NP is a relative clause, which is a nominalized clause placed in front of the head noun, connected by the particle DE. The head noun refers to an omitted argument in the nominalized clause (subject or direct object). Some examples are shown below.

Gapped Object: The head noun refers to the omitted direct object of the nominalization.

Gapped Subject: The head noun refers to the omitted direct object of the nominalization.

What about indirect object? In Chinese sentences with ditransitive verbs (V+Obj1+Obj2), the first object is the indirect object and the second object is the direct object. When the indirect object is actually the head noun, its original position in the relative clause is typically replaced using a pronoun, as illustrated in (3). (Li & Thompson) This phenomenon is to be considered later.

2.2 Implementation: Relativizing DE In Zhong, two rules, ”extracted-comp-phrase” and ”extracted-subj-phrase” perform the task of extracting comp or subj for the verb, respectively. Their HEAD-DTR, the verb, doesn’t have constraint on MC, which allows the extraction to happen in both main clauses and subordinate clauses. The mother node has ”MC +”, since DE is defined to take comp with ”MC +” in its lexical type.

Notes from the Session

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