Three Sensitive Positions and Chinese Complex Sentences: A Comparative Perspective

The positioning of sentential connectives in Chinese complex sentences is more flexible than their counterparts in English. Sentential connectives in Chinese can be placed in three sensitive positions: clause-initial, predicate-initial, and clause-final positions. Due to the co-existence of prepositions and postpositions in the language, sentential connectives can be placed in both clause-initial and –final positions in Chinese. It is also highly remarkable that sentential connectives can be positioned in the predicate-initial position, which is attributed in this paper to a consequence of the nature of sentence head in the language. Double-subject construction and verb-copying construction are considered as ‘special’ sentence patterns in Chinese. It is argued in this paper that they are partially due also to the nature of sentence head, i.e., the recursiveness of IP. Those special sentence patterns, together with the unique distribution of sentential connectives in those sentence patterns, are simply epiphenomena, which don’t have to be specified in the core system of grammar, but can be derived from the particular nature of sentence head in the Chinese-type languages in interaction with some cross-linguistically invariant principles of UG, which in turn has resulted from the setting of sentence head ‘I’ parameter.