Dynamic Parsing Of Possessor Raising Construction In Mandarin Chinese

Chinese NP₁-Vi-NP₂ construction has long been the focus of Chinese grammar research. Earlier researchers pay more attention to the form of the sentence than to the semantic and pragmatic aspect of this construction. After 1980s, under the influence of functionalism, the research on the reference of NP₂ has been put forward greatly. After 1990s, the approaches of formalism such as case theory, movement and minimalist approach, etc are applied into the analysis of this construction.Up to now the researches on the NP₁-Vi-NP₂ construction are static and focus on the utterance production. However, there are reasons for assuming that utterance interpretation is also an important part of communication. Out of this consideration, in this thesis, Dynamic Syntax, a new theory framework is introduced into the analysis of the Chinese NP₁-Vi-NP₂ construction.According to Dynamic Syntax, the process of language understanding is a monotonic process of building a logical form following the left-right sequence of words, with the goal of establishing some propositional formula as interpretation. Specifically, the paradigm seeks to develop a grammar formalism for characterizing the structural properties of language by means of modeling the dynamic process of interpretation. What is novel about this formal articulation of the parsing process is that it purports to provide an explanation of syntactic properties of natural language.In this thesis, the author combines the principles of DS with the grammar features of Chinese to analyze the NP₁-Vi-NP₂ construction, especially the syntactic and semantic function of NP₁, from a new angle, and tests the soundness of these analyses.