The Nominalization Of " XP De" In Mandarin Chinese

For nearly100years, de-constructions have been regarded as a hot topic amongChinese linguists. Their interest has been mainly concerned with the syntactic andsemantic features of de and the internal structure of de-constructions. In1924, in hiswork “New Chinese Grammar”, Li Jinxi first began to study de-constructions. AfterZhu Dexi published the essay of “On De” in1961, more and more scholars conducteda lot of studies on de-constructions in many distinctive perspectives and this deeplycontributed to the setting up of modern Chinese grammar.Till now,over three hundredpapers have been published focusing on Chinese de-constructions from different ways(Xu,2006). However, there still exist many controversial issues, which demandfurther discussion and deeper research.Based on their studies, this thesis proposes the following questions:(1) What are the proofs and reasons for the nominalization of “XP+de”construction? In such a construction, what’s the syntactic role of de? Why is denecessary in a specific construction and what’s its semantic role?(2) What are the syntactic and semantic roles of “XP de”? What is the semanticrelationship between the modification of “XP de” and the modified nominal element?Building upon earlier work and following Chierchia’s property theory and Huang(2006)’s analysis of regarding “de” as a kind of type conversion operator, we try ourbest to develop our statement as follows: Firstly, we provide evidence to display thatthe semantic type of common nouns in Chinese is <e>. And then we claim that thewhole structure of [XP de YP] is right-branching but not left-branching, taking thenoun as its head. Secondly, we introduce the rules of coordination structure to provethe nominalization of “XP+de” and also try to find the real reasons for itsnominalization. Thirdly, on the basis of the semantic combination rule FunctionalApplication, we try to derive the semantic type of de. Then we find out that de is oftype <<e, t>, e>, which means that de functions as a type-shifter. Fourthly, we discussthe semantic combination of “XP de” and the following nominal element, and proposeour analysis to solve the problem of the semantic combination crash.