The syntax and processing of relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese

This thesis investigates relative clauses (henceforth RCs) in Mandarin Chinese as spoken in Taiwan from both syntactic and processing perspectives. I also explore the interaction between these two areas, for example, how evidence from one area lends support to or undermines theories in the other area. There are several goals I hope to achieve: First of all, there is a significant gap in the sentence processing literature on Mandarin Chinese and in particular on RCs in Mandarin Chinese. I aim to bridge this gap by conducting experiments that will provide basic understanding of how Chinese RCs are processed. In doing so, I also provide a more complete picture of processing RCs across languages. In this thesis, I report three online reading experiments on Chinese RCs. I show that even though Chinese is also an SVO language like English and French, the results with regard to processing subject-extracted versus object-extracted RCs in Mandarin Chinese are very different from results for the same construction in other SVO languages. Thus, even though subject-extracted RCs are less complex in other SVO languages, they are more complex in Mandarin Chinese. These findings help tease apart various processing theories, in particular, I show that even though resource-based theories, canonical/non-canonical word order (frequency) theories, theory based on accessibility of syntactic positions and perspective shift theory all account for the facts reported in other SVO languages, results from Chinese are only compatible with resource-based theories and canonical/non-canonical (frequency) theories.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2003

Author dc:creator

• Hsiao, Franny Pai-Fang, 1975-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Edward Gibson.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7990
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng, engchi

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7990

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/7990