Finiteness, opacity, and Chinese clausal architecture

Abstract

Although languages differ considerably in the way they encode finiteness syntactically or morphonology, the ‘finiteness distinction’ exists as a universal grammatical phenomenon. This chapter will re-affirm the claim that the distinction exists in Chinese, with robust clustered properties that diagnose the different clause types on several scales, with respect to temporal (in)dependence, clausal opacity/transparency, inter-clausal integration, etc. I address how finiteness is encoded, considering the hypothesis that finiteness is related to surface clause sizes (e.g., CP, IP, vP). As for the origin of the clause size differences it is suggested that they arise from the fundamental (in)ability of a clause to make deictic temporal reference. Under a pronominal theory of tense semantics, the nature of a syntactic T0 (being an anaphor, a pronominal or an r-expression) determines its binding properties as well as its possible clause size, with ensuing signature properties that mark the finiteness distinction.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.