Chinese Parasitic Gaps In Syntactic Judgment Experiments

• Main Authors: Zi-ping Hsu, 徐子平
• Other Authors: James Myers
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/39517985800911427904

碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 語言學研究所 === 100 === Theoretical syntacticians have used informal judgments of sentence acceptability as the primary evidence concerning grammaticality in syntax. However, this method has been controversial for a long time (Myers 2009a). Recently, formal judgment experiments have turned to mainstream, inspired by the publications of Schütze (1996), Bard et al. (1996), and Cowart (1997). This paper primarily aims at exploiting formal experiments to investigate the status of parasitic gaps (Pg) in Mandarin Chinese (i.e. whether Pg involves syntactic movement). Pgs are interesting phenomena and attract extensive discussion since they exhibit that gaps can appear inside island. The debate of the status of Pg has long been unresolved for several years. Specifically, some syntacticians treat it as trace left by movement (e.g. Chomsky 1986, Tsai 1997, Lin 2005, Ting & Huang 2008), and others consider it as a free empty category for which syntactic movement is irrelevant (Xu 1990). In addition, some syntacticians (e.g. Parker 1999) treat Pgs as marginal constructions in English. Hence, this study aims to observe whether Pg constructions are also a marginal phenomenon in Chinese. Experiment 1 examined the basic feature of Pg (i.e. whether the alleged Pg is licensed by real gap). Experiment 2 investigated whether Pg involves overt syntactic movement. Experiment 3 explored whether parasitic gaps demonstrate Subjacency effect proposed by Chomsky (1977). The results demonstrated that firstly the Pg is licensed by real gap since Pg is more acceptable than single gap inside island. Secondly, Pg is licensed by Wh-fronting words (overt syntactic movement), but not Wh in-situ words. This is consistent with Lin (2005). Finally, Pg conforms to the Subjacency effect since extraction of EC (empty category) crossing one bounding node is more acceptable than extraction of EC crossing two bounding nodes. To sum up, the present study found Pgs are psychologically real phenomena in Mandarin Chinese since their mean acceptability is closer to simple grammatical sentences than ungrammatical sentences. What’s more, it has been proved that Chinese Pgs involve syntactic movement (Tsai 1997, Lin 2005, Ting & Huang 2008) since they are sensitive to island constraints.