Abstract
This research examines factors that influence the frequency and ease of processing of relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin Chinese. We conduct a corpus study of RCs with transitive action verbs in the Chinese Treebank corpus 5.0 and investigate two factors that have been argued to influence processing ease: RC type and classifier position. Our corpus analyses show that subject-modifying RCs are more frequent than object-modifying RCs and that within each type, subject-gapped RCs are more frequent than object-gapped RCs (SS > SO > OS > OO), which fits with claims that Mandarin Chinese resembles English in preferring subject-gapped RCs in subject position. Building on Pu (2007), we discuss how these patterns relate to the animacy of the head noun. In addition to RC type, classifier position has also been claimed to influence ease of processing. Our corpus reveals an asymmetrical pattern of classifier distribution in subject-gapped and object-gapped RCs, which we hypothesize follows from two processing principles having to do with anticipatory processing and lexical access. Our results help shed light on some controversies in the research on Mandarin RC processing.
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Notes
- 1.
For instance, zhugua n can be a noun (“person in charge”) or a verb (“manage”). Its lexical ambiguity cannot be resolved until the next word is encountered.
(1) zhuguan jingji de fu shizhang.
(2) zhuguan jintian mei lai.
manage economy DE vice mayor
person-in-charge today not come
‘the mayor who manages economy’
‘The manager did not come today.’
- 2.
This intuition is also shared by Audrey Li (p.c.).
- 3.
However, it is worth noting that if the subject preference is correct, the RTs should presumably be BEI > BA > Canonical, since the gap in the BA condition occupies the VP-internal subject position (according to Lin’s tree diagram), which should be preferred over the object position in the Canonical condition. Thus, there seems to be an inconsistency between these predictions and the reading/rating data.
- 4.
Kuo and Vasishth called these sentences adjunct relatives. However, since there is no gap in these sentences, they are not relative clauses in the strict sense. We refer to them as complementations, because, based on their English translation, they are more like a complementation structure where the second NP is the complement of the preceding NP connected by a preposition (e.g., “the competitiveness of the company to increase”, “the cost of hiring employees”). See similar coding criteria in Chang, Jurafsky & Manning (2009) for their five classes of the homograph DE in Chinese-English machine translation.
- 5.
For more on animacy in Chinese, see MacWhinney (1989).
- 6.
Xinhua is the official news agency of the People’s Republic of China.
- 7.
The remaining 151 files are mostly from Taiwan Sinoranma magazine, the style of which does not quite match that of the files analyzed.
- 8.
The wording “obligatory” means the syntactic phrasal head of ClP must be projected, though its phonetic content can be null given special discourse or pragmatic contexts (e.g., zhe-ø ren “this-ø person”).
- 9.
This may not be surprising since classifiers are necessitated by the presence of a numeral or a demonstrative. Its use is subject to special discourse contexts such as previous mention or referential events that specify numbers.
- 10.
Levy’s incremental probabilistic approach predicts that the more dependents seen in an utterance, the more information is available to the comprehender to expect the governor (e.g., the head noun’s identity and location).
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Wu, F., Kaiser, E., Andersen, E. (2010). Subject Preference, Head Animacy and Lexical Cues: A Corpus Study of Relative Clauses in Chinese. In: Yamashita, H., Hirose, Y., Packard, J. (eds) Processing and Producing Head-final Structures. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9213-7_9
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