Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-133). / 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. / (cont.) Secondly, it has been noted that in many cases, resource-based theories and canonical/non-canonical word order (frequency) theories are both compatible with data from sentence processing studies. Resource-based theories attribute processing difficulty associated with subject-extracted RCs to higher storage cost in processing subject-extracted RCs whereas frequency-based canonical word order theory such as the one proposed in Mitchell et al. 1995 attributes this to the less frequent occurrences of subject-extracted RCs in corpora. As a result, it is very difficult to tease these two theories apart. However, I conducted a Chinese corpus study in this thesis and I show that there is no correlation between structural frequencies in corpora and behavioral measures such as reading times, as predicted by frequency theories. As a matter of fact, subject-extracted RCs occur more frequently in the Chinese corpus. This undermines the validity of frequency theories in explaining the processing data reported in this thesis. Thirdly, Aoun and Li to appear argue that there is syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of positing two distinct syntactic derivations for RCs with or without resumptive pronouns. RCs containing gaps involve head-raising of the head NP (i.e. no operator movement) as reconstruction of the head NP back to the RC is available. On the other hand, RCs containing resumptive pronouns involve an empty operator in [Spec, CP] and no head-raising of the head NP (since reconstruction is unavailable) ... / by Franny Pai-Fang Hsiao. / Ph.D.

This thesis examines some selective cases of morphophonemic alternation in Mandarin Chinese. It presents analyses of the function -of the retroflex suffix -r and describes several conditions for tone sandhi. The suffix -r functions not simply as a noun formative. Some of the suffixed forms have consistently different meanings from the roots on which they are based. The suffix -r also plays a role in poetry as a time-filler to make each line of a poem fulfill the requirements of the strict number of characters and rhyme. This thesis also explains what causes the tone pattern of words such as xiaojie and jiejie to be pronounced differently. These tonal changes are found to be related to the way in which a word is formed. Compounding, reduplication and suffixation differ with respect to how they effect tone sandhi. Tone alternations in actual speech are explored to determine how tone sandhi produces each pronunciation and how grammatical structure and other factors are relevant.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Linguistics, June 2000. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Education

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 224-232).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-112).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1982.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 281-286). Also available on the Internet.