The Identifiability And Syntactic Function Of Noun Phrases In Mandarin Chinese:from A Pragmatic View

The complexity in the identifiability of Chinese noun phrases and their syntactic function has long been a controversial issue. Numeral NP is the lexical form mainly used for unidentifiable referents, and demonstrative NP for identifiable ones. The identifiability of the referent of a bare NP is assumed to be determined by the syntactic function of the NP, since a bare NP has no specific referential property when used alone.Identifiability is a cognitive category to account for whether the speaker assumes the addressee is able to pick out a certain referent from among all those which can be designated with a particular linguistic expression and identify it as the one which the speaker has in mind. Since identifiability of referents is closely related with presupposition and discourse context, a research based on some real novels may be practical to find out the correlation between the grammatical function of a nominal expression and the identifiability of its referent.The research based on several novels indicates that there is no one-to-one correlation between the referential meaning of a noun phrase and its grammatical function. Bare NP、numeral NP and demonstrative NP each has its own particular referential property. These propeties together with information structure and sentence focus are among the factors that make an expression the way it is.