How Subjective Is the Subject?

Annali di Ca’ Foscari: Serie Orientale

Morbiato, Anna¹ 

[1] Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italia;

关键词: Grammatical relations. Mandarin Chinese. Argument selectors. Reflexivisation. Quantifier float.;   

DOI  :  10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2018/01/014

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

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 relativization, reflexivization, 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.

【 授权许可】

Unknown