汉语关系从句多重递归的分布和限制  

Distributions of and Constraints on Multiple Recursions of Relative Clauses in Chinese

作　　者：丁彧藻 陈保亚[2] DING Yuzao;CHEN Baoya

机构地区：[1]福建商学院外国语学院 [2]北京大学中国语言学研究中心

出　　处：《当代语言学》2023年第5期669-692,共24页Contemporary Linguistics

基　　金：国家社会科学基金重大项目“我国民族音乐文化与语言数据集成及共演化研究”(22&ZD218)的资助。

摘　　要：汉语前置关系从句多重递归的分布、发生率、嵌套方式、嵌套层级和论元关系化的方式至今不甚清楚。对四位汉语作者代表性作品中前置关系从句结构的穷尽性考察发现,汉语关系从句多重递归受“句尾重心”原则的制约,主要分布于上级小句的谓语部分,连续嵌套的最大层级是两层,连续中心嵌套(自我嵌套)的最大层级也是两层,发生率均极低。在多重递归关系从句结构中,未见直接宾语双重关系化的用例,且上层关系从句的直接宾语关系化将导致无法构建多重中心嵌套的关系从句结构。数据显示汉语关系从句的多重递归特别是多重中心嵌套递归受到多方面限制。关系从句递归运算是多种子系统能力的合成,包括概念转喻过程和概念结构的嵌套计算。There are conflicting views on the center-embedding complexity of clauses.Chomsky(1956)hypothesizes that sentences with arbitrary central recursion are grammatical in English,whereas Reich(1969)holds that center-embedded recursion of any grammatical construction in any language should be limited to a depth of one.Nevertheless,the two views have not yet been supported by solid empirical evidence from different languages.Previous empirical studies mainly collected data from natural language texts of Standard Average European(SAE)languages.Although it was found that there are attested examples of sentences with multiply center-embedded recursions in those languages,the occurrence of these types of sentences is extremely rare and the maximal degree of center-embedding in written languages is three.Relative clauses are most powerful in center-embedding among all types of clauses.They predominate at all depths of center-embedding in SAE languages(Karlsson 2007a).Modern Standard Chinese with basic SvO word order has a unique prenominal type of relative clauses.However,questions regarding the distributions,incidences,embedding modes,embedding degrees,and argument relativization patterns of multiply recursive relative clauses in Modern Standard Chinese remain unclear to date.We therefore conducted an empirical study of multiply recursive relative clauses in Chinese,with data from natural language texts written by four distinguished Chinese language authors.An exhaustive examination of prenominal type of relative clause structures in these works shows that multiply recursive relative clauses are mainly found in the predication part of their superordinate clauses due to the constraint of end-weight principle,and that the maximal degree of consecutive embeddings and center-embeddings(self-embeddings)is two,both with extremely low incidences,but the incidence of multiple central recursions of Chinese relatives is significantly higher than that of English ones.Double relativization of direct objects is not found in Chinese.Fur

关 键 词：递归 嵌套 唯递归假说 关系从句 

分 类 号：H146[语言文字—汉语]