汉语中究竟有没有关系从句？怎么样的语言形式是汉语关系从句的表现？如何形式化地定义汉语的关系从句？如何将汉语纳入到普通语言学的大框架内，与不同类型的语言一同讨论？如何使传统的汉语语法与当代语言学理论相结合，为汉语研究提供新的研究话题及方法？本文将以汉语中关系从句的地位确认、句法辨析及定义重设为例，在普通语言学视角下对汉语的语言现象进行重新审视；同时，希望通过当代语言学理论为汉语中一些看似难以归入语言普遍性的句法结构提供分析方法上的参照。

Does Chinese have relative clauses? Which linguistic form(s) represent(s) the Chinese relative clause? How to define the Chinese relative clause in a formalized way? How to analyze the Chinese under the framework of general linguistics in comparison of other languages? How to associate the traditional Chinese grammar with the modern linguistic theories in order to offer new research topics and methods of analysis? This article will take as example a serial of questions as the recognition, the syntactical distinction and re-definition the Chinese relative clause to investigate, in the perspective of general linguistics, the Chinese language phenomena. Meanwhile, we aim to supply methodological reference to the analysis of the Chinese syntactic structures which are supposed to be difficult to fall into the language universals.