TY - JOUR
T1 - On the climbing of the particle suo in Mandarin Chinese and its implications for the theory of clitic placement
AU - Ting, Jen
N1 - Funding Information:
1. I would like to express my gratitude to Yafei Li for his valuable comments and suggestions on various versions of this article. Earlier drafts of this article were presented at the 80th Annual Meeting of Linguistic Society of America, Albuquerque, NM, January 2006, at the 6th Workshop on Formal Syntax and Semantics, Taipei, Taiwan, January 2009 and at the 17th Annual Meeting of International Association of Chinese Linguistics, Paris, France, July 2009. I am grateful to the audiences at those presentations for their helpful comments. I also benefited from discussing the subject matter of this article with Yuyin Hsu and Rui-heng Ray Huang. I wish to acknowledge the anonymous TLR reviewers for providing constructive and insightful comments on the earlier draft of this article. Special thanks go to Ian Roberts for generously sharing with me the manuscript of his book “Agreement and head movement: Clitics, incorporation and defective goals” and to Rui-heng Ray Huang and Hong-lin Larry Li for editorial assistance. Mistakes are exclusively my own. This work was supported by the National Science Council of Taiwan under Grant No. 93-2411-H-003-055.
PY - 2010/12
Y1 - 2010/12
N2 - Assuming with Ting (Journal of East Asian Linguistics 12: 121-139, 2003) that the derivation of the particle suo in (Mandarin) Chinese targets V/I/T categories on a par with Romance pronominal clitics, I investigate the comparable climbing phenomenon of suo in Chinese. An important generalization that emerges from this comparison is that in contrast to the monoclausal properties in Romance clitic climbing, the climbing of suo exhibits properties of a biclausal configuration. I conclude that clitic climbing crosslinguistically is not necessarily associated with restructuring effects and argue that the facts of climbing of suo is best captured by a head movement approach to clitic placement first advocated by Kayne (Null subjects and clitic climbing, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989b, Linguistic Inquiry 22: 647-686, 1991).
AB - Assuming with Ting (Journal of East Asian Linguistics 12: 121-139, 2003) that the derivation of the particle suo in (Mandarin) Chinese targets V/I/T categories on a par with Romance pronominal clitics, I investigate the comparable climbing phenomenon of suo in Chinese. An important generalization that emerges from this comparison is that in contrast to the monoclausal properties in Romance clitic climbing, the climbing of suo exhibits properties of a biclausal configuration. I conclude that clitic climbing crosslinguistically is not necessarily associated with restructuring effects and argue that the facts of climbing of suo is best captured by a head movement approach to clitic placement first advocated by Kayne (Null subjects and clitic climbing, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989b, Linguistic Inquiry 22: 647-686, 1991).
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U2 - 10.1515/tlir.2010.016
DO - 10.1515/tlir.2010.016
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79551608016
SN - 0167-6318
VL - 27
SP - 449
EP - 483
JO - Linguistic Review
JF - Linguistic Review
IS - 4
ER -