Book contents
- The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
- The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Conventions Used in the Examples
- Abbreviations and Symbols
- 1 Some Preliminaries
- 2 Copular Word and Construction
- 3 Focus and Wh- Words
- 4 Serial Verb Construction
- 5 Disyllabification
- 6 Resultative Construction
- 7 Information Structure
- 8 The Passive Construction
- 9 The Disposal Construction
- 10 Verb Copying and Reduplication
- 11 The Comparative Construction
- 12 The Ditransitive Construction
- 13 Aspect and Tense
- 14 Negation
- 15 The Boundedness of the Predicate
- 16 Classifiers
- 17 Demonstratives from Classifiers
- 18 Distal Demonstratives from Phonological Derivation
- 19 Pronouns, Plurals, and Diminutives
- 20 Structural Particles
- 21 Word Order and Relative Clauses
- 22 Conclusions
- References
- Primary Sources of Texts
- Index
21 - Word Order and Relative Clauses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2023
Book contents
- The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
- The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Conventions Used in the Examples
- Abbreviations and Symbols
- 1 Some Preliminaries
- 2 Copular Word and Construction
- 3 Focus and Wh- Words
- 4 Serial Verb Construction
- 5 Disyllabification
- 6 Resultative Construction
- 7 Information Structure
- 8 The Passive Construction
- 9 The Disposal Construction
- 10 Verb Copying and Reduplication
- 11 The Comparative Construction
- 12 The Ditransitive Construction
- 13 Aspect and Tense
- 14 Negation
- 15 The Boundedness of the Predicate
- 16 Classifiers
- 17 Demonstratives from Classifiers
- 18 Distal Demonstratives from Phonological Derivation
- 19 Pronouns, Plurals, and Diminutives
- 20 Structural Particles
- 21 Word Order and Relative Clauses
- 22 Conclusions
- References
- Primary Sources of Texts
- Index
Summary
This chapter addresses the typological change in relative clauses from postnominal to prenominal position over time. It is also proposed that the constituent order between the relative clause and the head noun is not directly related to the verb and its argument as is generally assumed in the literature but is correlated with the ordering between the VP and PP instead. The diachronic evidence of Chinese shows that the order change of PP from postverbal to preverbal position was the critical motivation for the change in question.
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- The Evolution of Chinese Grammar , pp. 511 - 543Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023