Comitative Relational Nouns and Relativization of Comitative Case in Mandarin

This paper discusses unmarked comitative relative clauses activated by comitative relational nouns. Different from canonical relative clauses, these clauses are restricted syntactically and semantically. This paper points out that comitative relative clauses are directly generated by the conceptual structure of comitative relational nouns rather than by transformation, since the semantic structures of these nouns contain comitative prepositions and their arguments. Therefore, comitative relative clauses are presentations of the downgraded predications of comitative relational nouns at the syntactic level. Besides, a questionnaire survey is conducted in this research to investigate the grammaticality of comitative relative clauses, through which, we find that these constructions, which are triggered by comitative relational nouns, are less grammatical than canonical relative clauses, which are generated by syntactic transformation.