The Syntactic Position And Semantic Property Of -men In Mandarin Chinese

Issues concerning -men has attracted a great deal of attention from linguists, with focus primarily concerned with its pragmatic properties and the classification of NP-men. However, there is little research with regard to the syntactic position and semantic function of -men. Li (1999) proposes that -men is a plural marker base-generated in Num; Wen & Chen (2002) posit that -men is base-generated in D; Yang (2005) advocates that -men is base-generated in little n. For the above three opinions, NP-men is obtained through Head Movement (Travis,1984). Concerning the semantic formula of -men, some linguists (Lu 1947, Chao 1968) posit that -men is a plural marker in pronouns but a collective marker otherwise. Some other linguists propose that -men is a plural marker when it is affixed to common nouns and some usage of proper names (Li & Thompson 1981:40, Li 1999). Cheng & Sybesma (1999), Iljic (1994,1998), on the other hand, attempt a unified analysis of the functions of-men which excludes its function as a plural marker, that is,-men is only a collective marker, referring to a situationally defined or anchored group. While Kurafuji (2004) has made a contrastive analysis, and he points out that -men and-tachi/ -ra are both plural and definite markers with formula of -ox[PL(Pi)(x)]. However, there are some problems which cannot be solved by the above analyses.Based on the above works, the thesis makes the proposal. Concerning the syntactic position, it is proposed that -men is base-generated very high in D in this thesis. It is a definite marker with [+Definiteness,+Collectivity] features encoded in the lexicon. NP-men is obtained through Phrasal Movement, but not Head Movement. Concerning its semantic properties, the author argues that -men is a group-forming operator, functioning to map a sum individual to a group individual. The semantic formula of -men is:↑ox[PL(Pi)(x)]. Then, the thesis analyzes the semantic interpretation of NP-men based on this semantic definition. The thesis also presents a pragmatic analysis between the nominal phrases zhexie haizi'these children'and zhexie haizi-men'these children-MEN'. It is suggested that there is no difference between their definiteness and plurality, however, under some circumstances, the nominal phrase sounds better with -men than that without it.