On the Relative Suo-Construction in Literary Chinese

Abstract

Inspired by Fuller (1999) and relying heavily on Ting (2005), this paper explores the suo-construction in Literal Chinese where suo occurs between the subject and the predicate and has the entire clause interpreted like a typical free relative. In section 2, first, we discuss the construction's syntactic properties in detail and critically review major previous analyses of the construction including Ting's (2005), where suo is analyzed as a [+WH] clitic moving to Infl in overt syntax and into C at LF. We point out that her analysis doesn't straightforwardly capture the nominal property of the suo-phrase in appropriate detail. In section 3, then, we make a proposal where suo substitutes into Infl and produces a hybrid category and its projections, and suggest that it generally has a slightly better empirical coverage over the syntactic properties of the suo-construction.