A Syntactic And Semantic Study On Person Designation Of English Nominal Phrase

Person indicates different discourse roles, they are the speaker, the addressee and the third party. Except pronoun has the person marking, DPs have default third person. During the usage of language, these DPs have default the third person which still maintain the third person form. According to the observation, the person designation of DP is not single. The person designation is influenced by the discourse context. DPs can denote the first person or the second person as the speaker or the addressee. This kind of DP we named it as imposter.Through the related date, we find that person has the form of person and semantic person. The person of semantics derived from discourse. Discourse role determines the person designation, and map to the sentence. The form of DP is free of semantic designation interference. In order to illustrate this special phenomenon, this paper establishes the relationship between the form of DP and speakers.Applying the Tetrachoric table distinguish different person of DP. From the Tetrachoric table, DP has three kinds of person designation. According to Collins and Postal, they give the definition of imposter which kind of phenomenon really exist. In the process of analysis, imposter is not the general R-expression of DP. Pronoun also has not this feature. Through R-expression, pronoun can express the definite designation of person. In order to prove DP has three kinds of person designation, suppose that a covert component in the sentence. This covert component is able to denote speaker and addressee. In this thesis, it has inserted appositive and a small clause. In the process of checking, insertion of the appositive can not solve the question. But there is a covert small clause in the sentence. The small clause can be the non-restrictive attributive clause. In the sentence level, non-restrictive attributive clause is redundant, so it has been omitted.The application of person is universal. Other languages also exist person. Through the exploration of this thesis aims at summarize a model. At the end, test maneuverability of the model. In order to provide references for relative research.