Gapping Construction In English And Chinese

The thesis mainly resolved to investigate from the perspective of Chinese and English the syntax of verb gapping, which refers to deletion of verb of the second coordinate clause in coordinate structures of two clauses with identical verbs. As it is widespread in human languages, verb gapping has attracted much attention in linguistic research ever since Ross (1967) and numeral insightful works have been generated. According to Jackendoff (1971), Hankamer (1973), Langendoen (1976), Stillings (1975), as well as Neijt (1981), verb gapping is derived through verb deletion of two coordinating IP, which is, however, unable to explain its specialties in scope and constraints on variables. In our research, we adopt Johnson's (1996) Across-The-Board (henceforth ATB) analysis and consider verb gapping to occur in VP coordination, which gives an adequate explanation for problems that previous verb deletion approaches are unable to explain. Concerning Chinese, we claim that there is no verb gapping though Li (1985) and Paul (1999) find some coordinate constructions which are similar with verb gapping. Verb gapping constructions in their sense are analyzed in this paper as verbless sentences with NumP as predicates. Verbless sentence is typical in natural languages and verbs are not indispensable for a sentence. While in English only finite verbs count as independent predicates, in Chinese verb phrases, nominal phrases, adjective phrases, numeral phrases as well as prepositional phrases can be taken as predicates. Moreover, we hold that Chinese allows Left Periphery Deletion (henceforth LPD), which is generated through the same mechanism as verb gapping in English, i.e. LPD in Chinese is derived through VP coordination and ATB; the only difference lies on V-to-v in the former and V-to-I in the latter.