Linguistic analysis reveals that clausal preposing and perceptual evidence drive evidential raising in Mandarin Chinese, suggesting unified structural rules for head-final subordination.
Key Points
To formulate the first unified syntactic and semantic analysis of evidential raising constructions in Mandarin Chinese.
Applied formal generative syntax and semantic frameworks to analyze the structural behavior and derivation of sentences containing 'de yangzi' ('seems like').
Evaluated dialectal Neg-raising interactions and root clause constraints across related superficially head-final subordinate structures.
Established that Phonological Form (PF) reordering preposes the embedded clause sister to 'yangzi' to satisfy the encliticization requirement of the definiteness-marking determiner head 'de'.
Showed that 'yangzi' provides not-at-issue evidential semantics requiring perceptual evidence, while an empty deictic situation pronoun subject enforces root-clause restriction.
Demonstrated that the clausal preposing mechanism generalizes across more than six other head-final subordination constructions.