On The Study Of Syntactic Structures Of Complex Numeral Classifier Phrases In Chinese

Mandarin Chinese is a typical classifier language whose classifiers have beenresearched for many years. The fact that classifiers of numeral classifier phrases inMandarin Chinese are obligatory has been noticed by many linguists who intend tocome up with a comprehensive interpretation for the syntactic structure or semantics ofnumeral classifier phrases (Piriyawiboon,2007). However, there are still someweak-points. In this thesis, we will present a study of syntactic structures of complexnumeral classifier phrases in Chinese from the aspect of formal syntax.From the literature of previous linguists such as Greenberg (1972), we havenoticed that numeral classifier phrases of Mandarin Chinese consist of three elements:the numeral, the classifier and the noun. What’s more, we cannot thoroughlyunderstand the internal structure of numeral classifier phrases simply from theperspective of linear structure and word order, therefore, we need to probe into therelation between internal elements of numeral classifier expressions from the angle ofhierarchic syntactic structure. In this thesis, we mainly study the syntactic structures ofthree kinds of classifiers (individual classifiers, container measures and standardmeasures) and try to answer the following three questions: a. What are the syntacticstructures of numeral classifier expressions in Mandarin Chinese? How to prove it? b.What are the syntactic structures of Numeral-CL-de-Noun andNumeral-CL-zhong/duo/ban-de-Noun? c. What is the relation betweenNumeral-CL-Noun and Numeral-CL-de-Noun? Are they different or the same?This thesis presents three proposals: the first one is that the syntactic structure ofnumeral classifier phrases are both left-and right-branching, by using evidence fromde, zhong de, duo de and ban de. The second one is that complex numeral classifierphrases are basically called general DeP constructions instead of relative clause.However, de is not the head of the whole phrase but the head of DeP. This kind oftheory is the same as Shi’s (2008) theory. However, Shi’s theory is not adopted for thesyntactic analysis of complex numeral classifier expressions. In this thesis, based onprevious studies, we conclude that syntactic structures of numeral-CL-de-noun andnumeral-CL-zhong/duo/ban-de-noun are not a unified left-branching orright-branching: on the contrary, each one has its own syntactic structure. The thirdone is that numeral-CL-noun and numeral-CL-de-noun are different in syntax. We present five arguments for this:1）double numeral classifier expressions2）parallelstructure3）the insertion of adverbs4）movement5）semantic focus.Based on the above proposal, this thesis presents a thorough interpretation of thestructures of complex numeral classifier phrases, as well as, the function andimportance of de in double numeral classifier expressions. This thesis has a significantmeaning to the study of classifier structure by adding boundary elements to thesyntactic structure.