Relative clauses and the noun phrase in Cantonese

A number of different formal analyses of relative clauses have been proposed over the years. For example, the adjunction analysis states that the relative clause is adjoined to the modified noun; the antisymmetry analysis (formulated in Kayne 1994) posits that the complementizer phrase (CP) is the direct complement of the determiner (the determiner being the head of the nominal projection), and that the NP being relativized is moved to the specifier position of the CP; yet another alternative is the small-clause analysis by Dikken and Singhapreecha (2004), which attempts to to unify the treatment of relative clauses with that of other nominal modifiers. However, to date there have been no attempts at a formal analysis of Cantonese relatives clauses, an exercise which may shed considerable light on the structure of relative clauses in general.