Differences Between English and Chinese Relative Clauses

According to Gass (1980), there are five main dimensions along which RC

formation varies among the world’s languages. The first dimension is adjacency to

the head NP. Although English and Chinese both require RCs to appear immediately

next to the head NP, extraposed RCs, namely, those placed at the end of the main

clause, are permissible only in English, especially for considerations of syntactic

complexity or for achieving a presentative function in discourse (Givon, 1993:

148-150), as is illustrated in (50) and (51), respectively:

(48) He bought a rug from his uncle’s estate that cost him a small fortune that he

couldn't really afford but went ahead and spent anyway.

(49) A spot was materializing that had pretty ominous look.

The second dimension has to do with the position of the RC with regard to the

head NP. English, a right-branching (or head-initial) language, requires RCs to

follow the head NP as post-nominal modifiers, whereas Chinese, a left-branching (or

head-final) one, forms RCs pre-nominally, i.e. to the left of the head NP. Such a

difference is clearly demonstrated in (52):

(50) mai hua de nei ge nuhai hen qiong sell flowers COM¹⁴ that CL¹⁵ girl very poor

‘The girl that sells flowers is very poor.’ (Cheng, 1995: 14)

The third dimension relates to how RCs are marked. English employs variable

relative markers, e.g. who(m), which, whose, that, to indicate what follows is an RC;

14 COM is the abbreviation for complementizer.

15 CL is the abbreviation for classifier.

Chinese instead uses only one invariable marker between the head NP and the RC,

namely, the complementizer¹⁶ de, which is not only used uniquely for RC marking

but also occurs in various structures of nominal modification in Chinese.

Fourthly, RC formation also differs in relative marker retention from language to

language. Unlike English relative markers, which are optional as long as they are in

the object position, the Chinese complementizer de is obligatory in all positions.

The last dimension involves the retention or omission of a pronominal reflex in

the process of relativization. The pronominal reflex refers to a resumptive pronoun

present in the RC that is co-referential with the head NP. English RCs disallow such

a resumptive pronoun. In contrast, pronominal reflexes are allowed in Chinese RCs,

depending on the position being relativized. Generally speaking, Chinese RCs tend

to adopt the gap method¹⁷ when relativizing out of the subject position, as in (52)

above, but the resumptive pronoun method when relativizing from such positions as

indirect object and prepositional object (Cheng, 1995), as shown in (53) and (54):

(51) zhangsan song ta hua de nei ge nuhai Zhangsan send her flowers COM that CL girl

‘the girl that Zhangsan sends flowers to her’ (p.18)

16 The syntactic status of de in Chinese RCs has long been debated. De is not a pronominal element, and thus cannot be treated as a relative pronoun like who(m), which in English. De has been thought of as either a nominalizer (Chan, 2004a) or a complementizer (Keenan, 1985). In order to make a direct comparison with English RCs, where that serves as a complementizer, de is treated in this paper as a complementizer in Chinese relative constructions.

17 The gap method is one of the universal relativization strategies employed in RC formation, in which there is one empty slot left in the embedded clause without any NP or resumptive pronoun found to

(52) zhangsan gen ta zhuzai yiqi de nei ge ren Zhangsan with he live together COM that CL person

‘the person that Zhangsan lives with him’ (p.18)

Another difference in RC formation across languages, not pointed out by Gass

above, is the permissibility of structural reduction of RCs (Li, 1996: 174). English

RCs can be reduced to participial phrases, prepositional phrases, adjectival phrases, or

to-infinitive phrases, while such reduction is disallowed in Chinese RCs, as can been

seen in (55):

(53) Eng.: visitors from London

Chi.: lunden lai de keren London come COM visitors ‘visitors who are from London’

Besides these structural differences, English RCs exhibit some

pragmatic/discourse functions not served by their Chinese counterparts. The most

obvious difference in function may be that the distinction between RRCs and NRRCs

in English does not exist in Chinese (Li, 1996). To put it another way, the primary

and sole function of Chinese RCs is to identify or characterize the head NP, specifying

which one or what type is meant by the speaker (i.e. restrictive); they do not serve to

supply parenthetical comments or afterthoughts (i.e. non-restrictive). Non-restrictive

RCs in English therefore have no RC correspondents in Chinese. For the same

function performed by English NRRCs, Chinese tends to use independent clauses

instead, as illustrated in (56):

(54) Eng.: The Browns, whose house has been burgled five times, never go on

holiday now.

Chi.: bulang jia zaiye bu qu du jia le Brown family again never go on holiday marker tamen de fanzi bei dao guo wu ci they GEN¹⁸ house be burgled tense five times

‘The Browns never go on holiday now. Their house has been burgled five times.’ (Li, 1996: 173)

According to Zhao (1989: 109, cited in Kamimoto et al., 1992), who conducted a

discourse analysis of RCs in English and Chinese, besides those serving to provide

additional information, there is another type of English RCs which normally

correspond to independent clauses in Chinese. Different from their prototypical

functions of identifying or characterizing, this type of English RCs, she claims, serves

to focus information. Three instances of such information-focusing RCs in English

are identified in her study. The first instance is represented by (57):

(55) RCs as the main assertions for sentences low in information value:

Eng.: China is a country that is behind Canada in technology and a number of scientific disciplines.

Chi.: zhongguo zai jishu he yixie kexue xueke China in technology and some science discipline fangmian shi luohou yu jianada de

aspects is behind preposition Canada particle ‘China is behind Canada in technology and a number of scientific

disciplines.’

The English RC in (57) acts as the locus of information in the sentence and is often

rendered into Chinese as an independent clause by the “shi…de” construction (a kind

of nominalization), which is used to express and emphasize an established fact.

Another instance is given in (58):

clauses serving as comments on their main clauses, which functions as topics. The

third instance of information-focusing RCs in English is seen in (59), in which the

equivalent structure in Chinese is an independent clause:

(57) RCs introduced by existential there:

Eng.: There were certain aspects of China which I was very interested in examining.

“information-focusing” RC is in effect a “presentative” RC, which serves to introduce

a thematically important, new referent into the discourse, as previously discussed in

Section 2.1.2.1.2.