現代漢語"所"字結構之長距離依附關係研究及其對普遍語法的含蘊意義

X-zero-dependencies are known to be highly local. It has been argued that syntactic head movement can affect locality constraints (Travis 1984, Chomsky 1986, Baker 1988, Matushansky 2006, Roberts 2010, Mathew 2015). While verbal heads seem to behave like phrases in undergoing A-bar movement (Cheng & Vincente 2013, Hein 2018, Harizanov 2019, Harizanov & Gribanova 2019), nominal categories appear to still provide solid support for strict locality constraints on head movement. The well-reported cases of clitic climbing in Romance, which are, arguably for good reasons, derived by head movement (Kayne 1989, Li 1990, Roberts 2010, Romain 2018, Villa-Garcia 2019), follow rigorous conditions and can be generally shown to be clause-bound in not crossing finite clause boundaries. In this context, we examine an exception: the particle “suo” in Mandarin Chinese, which has developed from a concrete noun meaning location in Classical Chinese (See Hu 2010 and references cited therein), can be shown to behave nearly on a par with Romance clitics but with a crucial difference: suo and its base position can form a dependency relation across a finite clause boundary. We argue that this long X-zero dependency exhibited by “suo” is rendered possible by the workings of the Principle of Minimal Compliance (PMC, Richards 1998) so the phenomenon does not challenge the strict locality constraints that have been proposed on head movement of nominal categories.