Noun-modifying clauses in Cantonese

Abstract

Whether relative clauses can be identified in Chinese is a recurrent question. This paper asks whether relative clauses are distinct from other noun-modifying clause constructions in Cantonese, one of many East Asian languages in which a noun can be preceded by a range of modifying clauses. The relationship between head noun and modifying clause may be a grammatical one, with the head noun being understood as an argument or an adjunct of the modifying clause; or it may be dependent on semantic and pragmatic factors. We conclude that Cantonese instantiates the General Noun-Modifying Clause Construction as proposed for Japanese (Matsumoto et al, this volume), with relative clauses forming a subset of modifying clauses in which a grammatical relation obtains.