On Reciprocal Markers And Reciprocal Constructions In Mandarin

Reciprocal constructions are widespread in world languages with differentmarkers; they are said to be marked by adverb‘sxianghu/huxiang’in Mandarin, whoseappearance leads to remarkable alterations in argument realizations and denotations.This thesis concerns on the relationship between the reciprocal markers andsyntax-semantic features in Chinese reciprocal constructions.The thesis firstly described the details of Chinese reciprocal constructions, such assyntactic components and semantic features. We found that verbs are restrictive in theconstructions, the objects might be‘duifang’or empty categories, and the reciprocalmarkers are both floated and fixed. Semantically, reciprocators are always plural andreciprocees are exclusive anaphors. The whole construction entails distributivity, whichalso yields ambiguities. Additionally, the argument realizations of Chinese reciprocalconstructions become more complex when they co-occur with other constructionswhich contain more than two arguments. And the accessibilities of arguments intopicalization, relativization and focalization are variable. Then we analyzed all thephenomena in the framework of Minimalist Program. As a functional head Rec, thereciprocal marker suppresses the external argument of its complement vP and projectsthe suppressed argument in [Spec，RecP] to check its [+Pl] feature. Rec could alsolicense the ellipsis of‘duifang’, merge with different vPs to yield various argumentstructures and contribute to the distributivity.Our analysis shows some general properties of reciprocal constructionscrosslinguistically. And technically, reciprocal markers in the form of adverbs couldmerge as functional categories to have significant impacts, although Mandarin lacksgrammatical morphology like other predicate-marking reciprocal constructions.