Finiteness in a language without finite morphology: An experimental study of Mandarin Chinese

A theme in research on finiteness suggests that finiteness is an abstract formal property of clauses that can be found across languages, even though languages might differ in how finiteness is realized morphosyntactically. This article considers these issues from the perspective of Mandarin Chinese, where there are competing claims over whether the language makes a finiteness distinction, and if it does, whether the complement clauses of control verbs, which are hypothesized to be nonfinite, can exceptionally license overt controlee subjects. In order to evaluate these competing claims, two acceptability judgment experiments were conducted to validate previously-reported examples of overt controlee subjects felicitously appearing inside control complements in Mandarin. The experiments reveal that these examples are not as acceptable as they are sometimes claimed to be, corroborating concerns occasionally raised about these examples. First, native speakers agree that null subjects can appear inside control complements, but show substantially more variability over whether overt controlee subjects can do so. Second, at an aggregate level, the presence of overt subjects reduced acceptability to a greater extent in control complements than in the complement clauses of belief verbs, like ‘think’ and ‘say.’ These results suggest that control and belief verbs have different subcategorization properties, and also bear on these competing accounts about finiteness. In particular, I note that these results can be understood rather straightforwardly under accounts in which Mandarin has a “classical” finiteness distinction like many languages with richer morphology, where control verbs take nonfinite complement clauses that do not license overt subjects.