Modern Chinese Gapping Sentences: An Information Structure Perspective

Ellipsis is a typical syntax-semantics interaction phenomenon and represents language's economy principle.Gapping plays a non-negligible role in ellipsis study.Up to now,studies on English and Dutch gapping have made marked achievements,with consensus being reached on its syntactic and semantic features,and progress being made in its generative process.On the contrary,the existence of gapping in modern Chinese,its range and causes still remain unknown.Previous studies have many problems,such as the lack of authentic linguistic data,misjudgment on data's grammaticality,confounding different gapping types and neglecting their phonological,syntactic,semantic and pragmatic features and their interaction.This thesis carries out a contrast test and an inidependent sample T-test.Results show that Chinese gapping is not an "all or nothing" phenomenon and contexts can greatly increase its acceptability.Its formation is also discussed from an Information Structure perspective.Given that in specific contexts,all the information(except two focuses)in a sentence is old information,topic-comment structure and identification structure can license gapping.In topic-comment structure,the first correspondent and first remnant are contrastive topics,and the second correspondent and second remnant are contrastive focuses.The opposite is true in identification structure.Quantifiers,imperative mood and demonstratives can also increase the acceptability of Chinese gapping by enhancing the contrast of two topics and two focuses,and limiting the universe of discourse respectively.If there are possessive pronouns,adverbs and negatives in Chinese gapping,they must be old information.Gapping can also occur in Chinese modifying compounds.It is more acceptable in cause-result and conditional compounds than result-cause compounds.Focus markers in conditional compounds can increase its acceptability.By English-Chinese comparison,this thesis finally points out that gapping in Chinese is more common than in English and is the result of syntax-semantics-pragmatics interaction.