THE RELATIVE CLAUSE CONSTRUCTION IN CHINESE: NOUN PHRASE ACCESSIBILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

The relative clause (RC) construction in Chinese is selected as the topic of this study, because it is a problematic area that has not been discussed thoroughly and systematically in the existent literature, including Chinese text books, grammar books, and linguistic papers. Having received a great deal of attention in the field of applied linguistics in recent decades, Keenan and Comrie's "Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy" (NPAH) is employed for examining the RC construction in Chinese, one of the fifty languages used by Keenan and Comrie and their followers to support the model and yet have never been closely looked at in the light of the model.; After the six positions proposed by Keenan and Comrie are combed through, it is found that their hierarchy hardly fits the RC construction in Chinese. Except for subject, the highest on the hierarchy, all others have a complexity which those researchers have failed to indicate. The "strict ordering" of the NPAH hardly means anything to Chinese. Instead, a grouping of the positions can indicate the NPA and the appropriate uses of resumptive pronoun in Chinese. In addition to the accessibility of positions on the NPAH to relativization, that of other NP positions, including universal and Chinese-particular ones, are also addressed.; Although the issue of NPA and resumptive pronoun is the focus of this study, other topics pertaining to the RC construction in Chinese, e.g. the prenominal and the postnominal positions of RCs, the determiners used with RCs, the constraints on RCs, the differences between RCs and elaborative clauses, are also in this research. Finally, to help English-speaking students, methods for translating English non-RCs into Chinese RCs as well as English RC-look-alikes into Chinese RC-look-alikes or non-RCs are discussed.