EXTRA: Zetao Xu (University of Hong Kong)

On reduced structures in Chinese: A labeling approach

There is a general debate concerning “reduced” clauses. Regarding the question-answer pair in (1), the sentential approach (Morgan 1973; Merchant 2004) would argue that the answer involves a full clause, which has undergone ellipsis/deletion. On the contrary, the non-sentential approach (base-generation) approach argues that they are originally built as reduced (Barton 1990; Progovac 2006, 2013).

(1) Question: Who is coming to dinner?

Answer: Tom./Your neighbor./No one./Me. / ??? I (Progovac 2013)

Cecchetto & Donati (2022) argue that certain types of sentences in Italian are reduced clauses with full force specification. Along this line, we propose that certain simple “subject-predicate” sentences with unaccusatives and ergatives in Chinese are reduced clauses, in particular, bare noun reduced clauses, as shown in (2).

(2) a. Qíjì             chūxiàn    le.

miracle      appear     SFP

‘The miracle has appeared.’

b.    Wèntí        jiějué      le.

problem    solve        SFP

‘The problem has been solved.’

Evidence is drawn from the distinction between bare nouns and not-so-bare nouns as well as the incompatibility of tense in reduced clauses. Different from Cecchetto & Donati (2022), we argue that PhiP (traditional TP, <φ, φ> in reduced structure) alone may not encode illocutionary force, which is liscenced via a force head C.