Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale

Rivista | Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale
Fascicolo | 54 | 2018
Articolo | How Subjective Is the Subject?

How Subjective Is the Subject?

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

Presentato: 16 Gennaio 2018 | Accettato: 02 Marzo 2018 | Pubblicato 25 Giugno 2018 | Lingua: en

Keywords ReflexivisationGrammatical relationsMandarin ChineseArgument selectorsQuantifier float


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