Table Of ContentVictor Junnan Pan
Resumptivity in Mandarin Chinese
Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs
Editor
Volker Gast
Editorial Board
Walter Bisang
Jan Terje Faarlund
Hans Henrich Hock
Natalia Levshina
Heiko Narrog
Matthias Schlesewsky
Amir Zeldes
Niina Ning Zhang
Editor Responsible for this volume
Volker Gast and Niina Ning Zhang
Volume 298
Victor Junnan Pan
Resumptivity in
Mandarin Chinese
A Minimalist Account
978-3-11-048759-6
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-049238-5
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-048975-0
ISSN 1861-4302
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for mom, Lily Pan, who raised me;
for granny (1921–2014) who always cherished me like her Little Prince;
for dad (1951–1990) who taught me how important it is to become independent.
Acknowledgements
This monograph presents the results of one part of my research project “Re-
sumptivity in the Minimalist Program” conducted since 2011. While writing
earlier versions of each chapter, I have tremendously benefited from the detai-
led discussions with many colleagues and friends who helped me to sharpen
the main ideas and proposals of this book. Alain Rouveret read every earlier
version of my analyses and generously shared his ideas with me; his vision on
the general architecture of minimalist machinery had an important influence on
me. Waltraud Paul, not only a faithful reader but also a colleague who has chal-
lenging points of view, spent hours and hours discussing every single detail and
every Chinese example with me during those years. As she often says, the real
devil is in the detail. Dylan Wei-Tien Tsai greatly inspired me on interpretations
of gaps and bound pronouns. During his stay in Paris in 2015, we had many
occasions to talk about linguistics and I learned a lot from him. Haihua Pan and
Jianhua Hu gave me many insightful comments on the restrictions of topicaliza-
tion both in Paris and in Beijing. Paul Law always shared his ideas and concerns
with me wherever we met. Our discussion on the bound variable reading of
anaphora and Skolemized choice functions in the train from Brest to Lannion
during a fieldwork for our project on resumptive pronouns in Breton helped me
to clarify certain passages in this book. As the responsible editor of this book,
Niina Ning Zhang not only encouraged me during the entire project but also
provided me with many good ideas. She gave me a true thorough review going
through page-by-page the near-final version of the manuscript, which saved me
from unclear passages. I also express my gratitude to the two anonymous re-
viewers who helped me to make my point precise and accurate. Chapters 2, 3
and 4 have been presented in different conferences. The present version of ana-
lyses includes comments from the audience: The 6th International Spring Forum
organized by The English Linguistic Society of Japan (ELSJ) (Tokyo University,
Japan, 2013), The 21st annual conference of the International Association of Chi-
nese Linguistics (IACL) (N ational Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan, 2013) and
The 22nd annual conference of International Association of Chinese Linguistics
(IACL) (University of Maryland, 2014). Special thanks go to Yen-hui Audrey Li,
Shu-Ing Shyu, Hajime Ono and Koji Fujita for their questions, comments and
suggestions during the question sessions and coffee breaks.
Mandarin data presented in this monograph have been double-checked
carefully with my native colleagues and students to whom I express my sincere
gratitude: Hongyuan Sun, Yiqin Qiu, Xiaoshi Hu, Xiaoliang Huang, Yan Li,
Xiaoqian Zhang, Chen Zhao and Xinyue Yu. I also thank the students who at-
VIII Acknowledgements
tended the weekly Reading Group of Formal Linguistics of Chinese that I have
been organizing since 2011 for sharing their intuition and judgments on the
sentences presented in this book. I used the draft of this book as teaching mate-
rial for my Master’s and Doctoral seminars on formal syntax and semantics and
on Chinese linguistics at the University of Paris Diderot-Paris 7 in fall semesters
since 2013 and I am happy to express my gratitude to the students who attended
to these courses for their helpful questions and feedback. I also thank Redouane
Djamouri and Nicolas Guilliot for discussing the data from both Arabic dialects
and French. Some important thoughts can be traced back to the research semi-
nars of Hamida Demirdache that I attended during my PhD years at the Univer-
sity of Nantes.
Earlier versions of different chapters were reread carefully by my dear col-
leagues and friends, especially Paul Boucher, Daniel Kwang Guan Chan and
Aaron J. Danner. I highly appreciate their comments and questions. I always
feel extremely useful to get feedback from readers of different domains, such as
generative syntacticians, linguists of Chinese languages, mathematicians, com-
puter scientists and so forth, since their comments made me clarify every single
sentence I put in earlier drafts.
The years during which I conducted this research project did not go by wit-
hout obstacles; fortunately, my friends and colleagues were always there to
support and encourage me unfailingly. I thank Blanche Chia-Ping Chiu, Chantal
Seguy, Frédérique Gilbank, Damien Fleury, M.M. Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest,
Hans Obenauer, Paul Boucher and Anne Boucher for their calls, afternoon
walks, coffee and tea times, which gave me a lot of courage and motivated me to
keep going forward in my career and life. In particular, Audrey Li and Dylan
Tsai encouraged me and supported me morally during those years. Colleagues
from my unit, Carla Soares-Jesel and Lucia Tovena, encouraged me during the
most difficult time. Thanks to these great friends, I was never defeated by diffi-
culties. I also thank my research institute LLF-UMR 7110 CNRS and the linguistic
department of the University of Paris 7, especially, Anne Abeillé, Olivier Bona-
mi, Caterina Donati and Claire Saillard for their support in this project.
During the publication process, the editor of TiLSM, Volker Gast, was ext-
remely encouraging and the De Gruyter editors, Julie Miesse and Birgit Sievert
were very helpful. I also thank Nancy Christ for her technical supports.
My dearest mum is always there to support me with her unfailing love.
Victor Junnan Pan
Paris
Spring, 2016
Contents
List of abbreviations XV
Resumptivity: an overview 1
Introduction 1
Resumptivity 2
Resumptive pronouns 2
Two types of resumptive pronouns 3
Two different points of view 4
Syntactic level:
to move, or not to move, that is the question! 10
Period of GB 11
Period of MP 15
Semantic level:
to move, or not to move, that is still the question! 18
Main proposals in this study 19
Against the macro-variation hypothesis 19
Against the “spelled out traces” analysis 20
Main proposals 20
Organization of the argumentation 24
Syntactic derivation: two types of A'-dependencies 27
Introduction 27
Distribution of resumptive pronouns in relatives and in dislocation
structures 30
Islands 30
Relatives 33
Dislocation structures 43
Summary 49
Crossover effects 51
Weak crossover effects 56
Relatives 56
Dislocation structures 61
Strong crossover effect 65
Relatives 65
Dislocation structures 67
Summary 69
Summary 71
Analyses 72
In the framework of Government and Binding theory 73
X Contents
.. In the Minimalist Program 76
... Match, Agree and Move 76
... Deriving resumptive constructions by Agree 81
.... Adger & Ramchand (2001, 2005) 82
.... Rouveret (2002, 2008, to appear) 87
... Resumption in Chinese 92
.... Island effects 93
.... Crossover effects 96
.... Resumptive dislocationstructures 100
.... Differences between relatives and dislocation structures 105
.... Locality 112
.. Summary 122
. Conclusion 124
Reconstruction and internal structures of resumptive pronouns 129
. Introduction 129
. Reconstruction effects and movement 132
.. Two types of reconstruction effects 133
... Reconstruction of anaphoric binding 133
... Reconstruction of the scope of a quantifier 133
.. Reconstruction effects and movement 134
.. Two types of resumptivities 136
... Two generalizations of Aoun et al. (2001) 136
... Against the generalizations of Aoun et al. (2001) 140
.... Against the first generalization of Aoun et al.:
absence of island 140
.... Against the second generalization of Aoun et al.:
presence of islands 142
... Conclusion 147
. Reconstruction effects and internal structures of resumptive
pronouns 148
.. Two types of resumptive pronouns:
strong pronouns/epithets and weak pronouns 149
.. Two types of copies: indefinite and definite (Guilliot 2006) 152
.. Two internal structures of resumptive pronouns:
Rouveret (1994, 2002, 2008, to appear) 157
.. Choice of internal structure of a resumptive pronoun 162
.. Summary 163
. Reconstruction effects in Chinese 165
.. Reconstruction and quantifier scope 166
