The Effect of Classifiers in Predicting Chinese Relative Clauses

Chinese is a typologically unique language with a combination of SVO word order and the N-final property (Dryer, 1992). It is also a classifier language in that each noun can be modified by a particular classifier depending on the semantic congruity between them. For instance, the classifier tiao can only modify a long, thin, and non-human entity. Thus it can modify a noun such as shengzi ‘string’, but not a human referent such as laoshi ‘teacher’. In Chinese relative clauses (henceforth RC), there is a relativizer DE that occurs at the end of the RC, immediately preceding the head noun. This means that a comprehender may not identify an RC structure until very late. For example, a temporary ambiguity may arise in object-gapped RCs (as in (1)), because until encountering DE, the comprehender may initially interpret the initial noun and verb as constituting a matrix subject and matrix verb: