Subject Preference, Head Animacy and Lexical Cues: A Corpus Study of Relative Clauses in Chinese

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.