Minimality in pronominal A’-binding? The asymmetrical distribution of Mandarin Chinese resumptive pronouns in relativization

Following from Aoun and Li’s observation of asymmetrical A’-bound pronouns in
Mandarin Chinese quantification, this thesis evaluates existing theoretical and
experimental research on Chinese relative structures especially resumptive pronouns in
relativization, and the pro-object resumptive clitic suo in relativization and the long
passives involving A’-binding as well as left-dislocated topicalization.
Then, this study focuses on the subject and the direct object resumption to
corroborate the corresponding theoretical description in the existing literature of
Mandarin Chinese resumption in the two positions against two sentence processing
approaches which yield different predictions. The experimental results confirm the
existence of an asymmetry of resumption between subject and object positions, as
partially predicted by minimality and not predicted by the garden-path model. However,
such asymmetry is found not absolute, as subject resumptive interpretation is still
possible under a disambiguating prosody, though harder to elicit than object strings,
suggesting a role of prosody-directed retrieval of lexical meanings more accurately
predicted by the lexical approach to sentence processing. In all, the results corroborate
a non-absolute asymmetrical distribution of resumptive pronouns in the subject and
object positions and support that both the theoretical constraint and lexical processing
are at play. Conceptually, the experimental results confirm that minimality is also at work for
pronominal A'-binding in the case of Mandarin Chinese resumptive relativization.
Moreover, the auditory experiment adds to the existing types of data and imply that
Mandarin Chinese resumptive pronouns may be used in non-island conditions, apart
from their usage in island conditions discussed in the literature.