A unified biclausal approach to right dislocation in Chinese
Ka-Fai Yip
May 2025 

This paper sets out to settle the debate on the clausal structure of right dislocation (RD) in Chinese. In RD, elements are displaced to the right of the sentence, either leaving a gap (gapped right dislocation, GRD) or a correlate (dislocation copying, DC). Despite remarkable structural similarities, GRD is often analyzed as having a monoclausal structure and DC as having a biclausal structure. Drawing on novel evidence from Cantonese and Mandarin, this paper argues that a non-uniform treatment is unwarranted and both GRD and DC are biclausal. It is proposed that GRD and DC share a unified syntax involving two underlying clauses, where the second one involves movement and deletion. The difference between GRD and DC is in the use of empty categories, which are abundant in Chinese but whose role has been largely unaddressed in previous studies of RD. I show that properties of empty categories in the first clause capture different variants of GRD as well as a typological correlation between null arguments and GRD. I also carefully review previous challenges to biclausality and demonstrate that none of them hold empirically or conceptually. The findings allow for a simpler yet empirically more adequate grammar of RD in Chinese, and moreover support a uniform view on RD across languages.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007912 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Accepted at JEAL
keywords:	right dislocation, copying, biclausal approach, empty categories, sluicing, cantonese, mandarin chinese, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [February 2025] v1 [February 2024]
Downloaded:	965 times

 

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