Modern Chinese Personal Pronoun And Its Related Syntactic Problems

Pronoun is a controversial word class in Chinese grammar system. Whether it is a word class, and whether it is content word or the function word are all in dispute. It is generally believed that pronoun is divided into three categories:personal pronoun, demonstrative pronoun, interrogative pronoun. However, it is believed that in international literature pronoun refers primarily to personal pronoun without including demonstrative pronoun and interrogative pronoun. In Chinese, it is generally agreed that personal pronoun is pronoun. Therefore, we take personal pronoun as the subject of our study, aiming at gaining a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of pronouns by examining personal pronoun.In the thesis there is also a comparative study between Chinese personal pronouns and English personal pronouns, for only in this way can we gain a meticulous observation along with full description and explanation.By comparison, the similarities and differences of personal pronoun in the two languages could be discussed as follows:1. Chinese personal pronouns have the same function with noun, all pronouns with feature [+Definite] can be modified, and the ’modifier+pronoun’ structure is universal in Chinese written language while in English personal pronouns have the determiner function, they can hardly be added with modifier, and the first and second personal pronouns can be modified more often than the third pronouns.2. Chinese is not a DP-language, in which bare noun can act as argument and the personal pronoun can either take or not take the attributive position for different pragmatic functions, while English is a DP-language, in which bare noun can not act as argument and possessive personal pronoun before nouns is necessary for syntactic requirements, they can conjoin nouns to constitute determiner phrase, so the possessive personal pronoun before a noun can not be omitted, and must be in the left3. In Chinese, almost all person pronouns can appear in appositive structure, and personal pronoun can be in the right or the left in the structure, the relationship between pronouns and nouns is merger. While in English, only the first and second personal pronoun and nouns can constitute DP, taking the left side.4. In Chinese, there are three types of topic structures, Chinese-style topic structures, adverbial topic structures and specifier topic structures. There is no looming personal pronoun in Chinese-style topic structures. Chinese-style topic structure does not include resumptive personal pronoun. Resumptive personal pronouns in adverbial topic structure can be deleted or used freely with syntactic approval, or else they must appear. Resumptive personal pronoun can not appear in the specifier topic structures. While in English, there is only adverbial topic structure, and resumptive personal pronoun must appear. The similarity between Chinese and English is personal pronoun all perform discourse anaphora in adverbial topic structure.5. There are differences in the types of verb in Chinese and English. Therefore, in Chinese, the dummy pronoun "ta" can be used between a verb and a number expression, as a focus marker. However, in English, there is no such usage.6. In Chinese, the dummy pronoun "ta" can be used in subject position, and in English, the pronoun "it" can also acts as expletive subject. The difference is that the former can be omitted in Chinese whereas the latter can not be omitted in English.These phenomena point to a theory that pronoun is a language unit with only phonetic form but without the semantic content. It is a separate word class as independent as content word and function word. Chinese personal pronouns are corresponding to nouns, while English personal pronouns corresponding to functional categories.Personal pronouns in English and Chinese need to get semantic content from their antecedent, thus they both gain anaphoric function. So personal pronoun can all be used as resumptive pronouns in topic structure.Pronoun is in sharp contrast with empty category. Therefore, there must be sharp differences in their syntactic performance. Empty category without phonetic form can only show a gap in the syntax while pronoun itself as phonetic form can be the placeholder on the syntactic location, thus "ta" in Chinese and "it" in English can be a placeholder.