Dynamic Parsing Of Verbal Phrase Ellipsis Constructions In Mandarin Chinese

Verbal phrase ellipsis constructions have been the concern of theoretical inguistics and computational linguistics over the last hundred years. Especially the elliptical constructions in dialogue, which are not confined in a single sentence, have pecome a troublesome problem for formal analysis. In this thesis, we focus on three categories of Chinese verbal phrase ellipsis constructions:Null Object Constructions (NOC), vP ellipsis constructions and shi-support constructions.The theoretical framework this thesis follows is Dynamic Syntax (DS). DS is a parsing-directed grammar formalism in which a decorated tree structure representing a semantic representation for a string is incrementally projected following the left-right sequence of words. What is novel about DS is its combination of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis. Especially the treatment of context in DS is advantageous in our analysis of elliptical constructions.This thesis analyzes the derivation mechanism of three categories of Chinese verbal phrase ellipsis constructions (NOC, vP ellipsis constructions and shi-support constructions) as well as their characteristics and differences by setting up dynamic analytical tree structures following DS. The study in this thesis provides a new method for the analysis of verbal phrase ellipsis constructions.