A Dynamic Parsing Approach to Presence and Absence of Resumptive Pronouns in Mandarin Relative Clauses

Abstract

Following dynamic syntax (DS), the present paper establishes a dynamic parsing model for Chinese relative clauses, in which the presence and absence of the resumptive pronouns are explained by showing how to construct a propositional structure representing the content of a sentence. The lexical actions of the Chinese relative “DE” are specified on the basis of an observation of the relevant data, and much discussion is made about the locality constraints for the computational rule of link. One important assumption is that the meta-variable projected by a pronoun and that projected by the lexical actions of verbs are different in that the former has a bottom restriction, which prevents the application of the rule of merge. The conclusion is that the presence or absence of pronouns in relative clauses is determined by whether the unfixed node decorated by the formula value projected by the relative “DE” can merge into the proposition structure. It thus follows that much space is devoted to the conditions that must be met in order for an unfixed node to be merged into a proposition structure.