Main clause phenomena and discourse moves: Mandarin incompleteness in subordinate clauses

Abstract

This paper identifies a tense-aspectual phenomenon called “incompleteness” (Kong, 1994; Tang and Lee, 2000; Gu, 2007) as a novel case of Main Clause Phenomenon (MCP) based on its distribution in various kinds of subordinate clauses. I show that an existing pragmatic analysis of incompleteness in matrix clauses (Sun, 2021; 2023) can be extended to capture the full data pattern, together with Djärv (2022)’s claim that root-like clauses that host MCP share the conventional discourse effects of putting an issue on the Discourse Table (Farkas and Bruce, 2010). By contrast, a strictly syntactic account cannot straightforwardly capture the distribution of incompleteness in subordinate clauses. I conclude that the case of Mandarin incompleteness implicates that, at least for some MCP, a semantic-pragmatic component is necessary in the analysis, supporting the long-existing idea that MCP is related to the so-called “asserted” clauses (Hooper and Thompson, 1973; Heycock, 2006; De Cat, 2012, among others).