A Syntactic Analysis Of The Structure Of Spatial Adpositional Phrases

The present study explores,from the perspectives of generative syntax,the structure of spatial adpositional phrases(SAPs)in Chinese,Dutch and English.The study first provides a re-classification of SAPs.Specifically,SAPs are classified,syntactically,into single SAPs(including SPrPs,SPoPs and SCPs)and successive SAPs(including serial SAPs and recursive SAPs),morphologically into simple and complex SAPs(including compound SAPs,SCPs,derivative SAPs and successive SAPs),and semantically into locational and directional SAPs.Based on the classification,the study examines and compares the structures of SAPs in Chinese,Dutch and English.It is found that single SAPs and serial SAPs of the successive SAPs category in the three languages share a left-branching layered structure consisting of a dirP[±dir](including SourceP,RouteP and GoalP),a viewP[+loc] and a locP[+loc](including locP,axpartP,KP and DP),while recursive SAPs of the successive category,being larger constructions involving successive employment of single-SAP-like constituents,have a left-branching conjoined structure: dir P[±dir]–(?/Cu)–dirP[±dir]–(?/Cu)–dirP[±dir].Apart from that,recursive SAPs in some languages could have a left-branching layered structure,with the DP complement of a preceding single-SAP-like constituent taking the following constituent as an adjunct.Cross-linguistic comparison also finds that SPrPs of the single SAPs category and recursive SAPs of the successive SAPs category exist in all the three languages.However,SPoPs and SCPs of the former category,derived through movement triggered by [EPP] features,only exist in Chinese and Dutch,while serial SAPs of the latter category mainly exist in English.The difference might be attributed to the head directionality of the three languages,with SPoPs and SCPs more likely to be found in languages with a mixture of head-initial and head-final structures,while serial SAPs more likely to be found in languages with strong head directionality.In addition,it is found that compound SAPs and derivative SAPs only exist in English and Dutch,while Chinese contains only simple SAPs.The difference might be attributed to the language families of the three languages,with compound SAPs and derivative SAPs more likely to be found in Indo-European languages with alphabetic writing,whereas Sino-Tibetan languages with hierographic writing tend to contain simple SAPs only.In sum,SAPs in Chinese,Dutch and English share a left-branching layered structure,which allows parameters.The syntactic parameters of the SAPs in the three languages are attributed to their head directionalities,while the morphological parameters are attributed to their language families.