Syntax And Semantics Of NP Conjunction Structure In Mandarin Chinese

Studies on conjunction structure in mandarin Chinese have always been a hot topic in the formal linguistics fields. With regard to the syntax and other issues about conjunction structure, a large number of researchers have proposed different opinions. There are two alternatives:flat structure and binary structure. Under binary structure, we still have three different categories. Including Munn’s (1987,1992) Boolean Phrase (BP) structure, Johannessen’s (1996) Conjunction Phrase (ConjP), and Zhang Ning’s (2006) complementation structure. However, there is still no consensus among them. Meanwhile, there is inadequate semantic research on conjunction structure. Zhu (1961) and Chu (2002)’s studies on the distribution and rules on conjunction phrases, Liu (2008)’s studies on syntactic constraints of Mandarin Chinese conjunction structure and his preliminary explanation. This thesis will reanalyze the syntactic and semantic issues of conjunction structure within the framework of formal linguistics theories, aiming to provide our own views on some basic problems. Specifically, we will focus on three main questions:(1) Does Chinese conjunction structure syntactically also hold a binary-branching structure as English? What is its syntactic configuration?(2) Why does predicate agree with just one conjunct in some cases and with the whole conjunction phrase in other places in Chinese NP conjunction structure? What are the differences between the and-like coordinators in Chinese and and in English?(3) What are the reasons of collective reading and distributive reading in NP conjunction structures of Chinese?Regarding the three questions above mentioned, we made a series of theoretical study and gave our correspondingly theoretical answers. First of all, we would argue that Chinese conjunction structure is a binary complementary structure, based on the evidences from binding effects, hosting coordinator, immobility of the coordinator and the second conjunct, and extraposition. Secondly, according to the data from English and other languages, we observe that there is a partial agreement phenomenon, and we compare the Chinese coordinator with English and, and intend to presume that coordinators of Mandarin Chinese have its intrinsic categorial features which can select the categorial feature of its conjuncts. What’s more, Mandarin Chinese displays a full agreement, except the coordinator "jian". Thirdly, in line with Link’s (1987) analysis on distributivity, Lin (1996)’s analysis on dou quantification and Schwarzschild (1991,1996) and Larsohn (1995)’s analysis, we conclude that overt operator and predicate work together producing the collective and distributive readings.In this thesis we discuss the syntax and semantics of conjunction structure and try to answer three theoretical questions. Among them, our syntactic analysis of conjunction structure provides a new solution to the long-existing controversy and presents a new perspective for further research on conjunction structure. At the same time, our semantic analysis of conjunction structure confirmed the necessity of Zhang Ning’s binary complementation structure.