LingLunch Xu Zetao and Victor Pan

Xu Zetao and Victor Pan (City University of Hong Kong): On reduced structures in Chinese: A labeling approach

There is a general debate concerning “reduced” clauses. Regarding a question-answer pair like “Who is coming to dinner? My friend.”, the sentential approach (Morgan 1973; Merchant 2004) would argue that the answer involves a full clause, which has undergone ellipsis/deletion. On the contrary, the non-sentential approach (base-generation) approach argues that they are originally built as reduced (Barton 1990; Progovac 2006, 2013). Cecchetto & Donati (2022) argue that certain types of sentences in Italian are reduced clauses with full force specification. Along this line, we propose that certain simple “subject-predicate” sentences with unaccusatives, ergatives and monoaccusatives in Chinese are reduced clauses, in particular, bare noun reduced clauses. Evidence will be provided to show that these sentences may not involve higher syntactic spine like TopicP, TP and vP. Different from Cecchetto & Donati (2022), we argue that PhiP (traditional TP, <φ, φ> in reduced structure) alone may not encode illocutionary force, which is licenced via a force head C.