Re: Mandarin Relative Clauses?

John Cowan wrote:

>On Sat, 18 Nov 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
> > OK, I'll take your word for it. Keep in mind, though, that my dialect of
> > Mandarin *is* different; if not grammatically, then in preference for
> > different ways of construction. I *have* noticed that Mandarin-speakers
> > from mainland China tend to say things in a different way, although we
> > are still mutually intelligible.
>
>Li & Thompson say this is the characteristic form of Mandarin (and
>Sinitic generally) grammaticality judgments: not "That is rubbish"
>but rather "That sounds possible, but it isn't the way I would say it".
If we treated that response to English sentence as a grammaticality
judgement, the status of syntactic theory would probably be much different
than it is now.


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Marcus Smith
AIM:  Anaakoot
"When you lose a language, it's like
dropping a bomb on a museum."
   -- Kenneth Hale
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