A Pragmatic Approach to the Parasitic Gap Construction in Chinese

Abstract

<span>This paper argues that there is no need to posit a syntactic-based licensing mechanism for Chinese parasitic gaps, because putative adjunct island condition doesn’t hold in Chinese. This is evidenced by an array of circumvention data, where context-salient contrastive reading or coherent rhetorical relation (e.g. cause-effect, result, violated expectations) can make adjunct extraction acceptable even without a second gap. I propose that biclausal relatives must be construed as identificational, and adjunct relatives in generic contexts may not fulfill this requirement. Consequently, multiple gap extraction is freely allowed in Chinese, and separate, pragmatic reasons rule out certain adjunct extraction.</span>