A Nanosyntactic Analysis Of Mandarin-Men

-Men in Mandarin Chinese is a functional morpheme associated with both plurality and definiteness.Its syntactic position and semantic function have long been controversial: quite a lot of studies have been done,but few could put forward a satisfactory solution.Within the framework of nanosyntax,this thesis proposes that the Mandarin-men,though being a singleton,encodes a syntactic structure,spanning two terminal nodes,one carrying the [+Pl] feature and the other carrying the [+Def] feature.In syntactic operation,-men instantiates both the [+Pl] feature under the Num head and the [+Def]feature under the D head in one go,which explains why the presence of-men triggers both plurality and definiteness.This study provides a detailed explanation of the distribution of-men and the restrictions on-men by applying the nanosyntactic principles.Assuming that there is only one-men,it presents a unified account of-men in three categories of-men constructions: singular personal pronoun-men,proper name-men and common noun-men,arguing that in all of the three kinds of constructions,the function of-men is to spell out both the [+Pl] feature and the [+Def] feature in the syntactic structure.In addition,the formal differences between the Mandarin plural personal pronouns and the English ones are accounted for within nanosyntax in this study: lexical items come in different sizes.The analysis of personal pronouns in this study is also in line with the recent proposal that personal pronouns are not as simple as they appear to be:they possess innate structures.It is proposed in this study that the personal pronouns in English and Mandarin Chinese are of a structure composed of the definite feature,a[±Pl] feature,and a person feature.