Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale

Journal | Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale
Journal issue | 54 | 2018
Research Article | How Subjective Is the Subject?

How Subjective Is the Subject?

A Fresh Look at Grammatical Relations in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This article re-examines the issue of grammatical relations in Mandarin Chinese in light of the results of recent large-scale typological research on grammatical relations (henceforth GRs) worldwide. Specifically, it discusses three syntactic operations and constructions that are cross-linguistically relevant to the definition of grammatical relations, namely relativisation, reflexivisation, and quantifier float. The study adopts a strictly language-internal typological approach and avails itself of natural linguistic data or sentences sanity-checked by native speakers. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, it explores the hypothesis that, in line with various other languages, GRs in Mandarin Chinese are construction-specific. Second, it proposes an alternative approach capable of explaining the conflicting evidence often pointed out in the literature on GRs and subjecthood in Mandarin Chinese.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: Jan. 16, 2018 | Accepted: March 2, 2018 | Published June 25, 2018 | Language: en

Keywords Quantifier floatReflexivisationMandarin ChineseArgument selectorsGrammatical relations


Read this article