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Share Paper 3724

Scoping out of Mandarin Relative Clauses
Huilei Wang
327-337 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

It has been a long-standing puzzle in the syntax-semantics interface that Quantifier Raising (QR) cannot cross finite-clause boundaries, which is not seen in overt wh-movement (Fox 1995, 2000; Reinhart 1995; Bruening 2001; Takahashi 2006; Mayr 2010, a.o.). However, recent works revisiting the clause-boundedness of QR have shown that finite clauses are not always a scope island (Wurmbrand 2018; Barker 2021, a.o.). This paper looks at exceptional scope effects in Mandarin relative clauses, providing novel evidence that relative clauses are not always scope island. I argue that the exceptional-scope effects in Mandarin RCs are derived from long QR of the embedded QP out of the RC to [Spec, DP], where it can take wide scope and bind a matrix pronoun. The proposed long QR does not violate syntactic and semantic constraints on QR due to the pre-determiner position of Mandarin relative CPs. It also accounts for the restriction of exceptional-scope effects in Mandarin SRCs, and has promising cross-linguistic predictions.

Published in

Proceedings of the 40th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Jiayi Lu, Erika Petersen, Anissa Zaitsu, and Boris Harizanov
Table of contents
Printed edition: $425.00