DE:A Post-Syntactic Perspective

The DE complement construction is a kind of sentence form with complex structure,changeable form and wide application in modern Chinese.The DE complement construction has always been a very common sentence pattern in Chinese and one of the most characteristic sentence form in Chinese.The researches on DE complement construction touch upon the studies from the perspective of syntax,semantics and pragmatics,among which the pragmatic and semantic aspects are less involved,while the syntactic aspects have achieved fruitful results.In the syntactic level,it mainly includes the studies of the syntactic structure of DE complement construction,the studies of relevant patterns of DE complement construction,the studies of the historical origins of DE and DE complement construction,and the studies of the properties of DE in DE complement construction.The consensus among scholars in the field of generative grammar is that the word DE must follow the verb after spelling out.But which kind of syntactic category DE belongs to has not been determined yet.For the nature of DE,there is no clear definition.Although Chen(2001)and Yang(1998)have made certain explanation towards its property,the property of DE remains to be further defined explicitly.Therefore,this thesis analyzes the basic derivation of the three kinds of DE complement construction based on the clear depiction of the syntactic properties of DE.This thesis concerns itself with the following three aspects: the exploration of the syntactic properties of DE;the syntactic derivations of the three kinds of DE complement constructions;and the motivation of the derivation of the three kinds of DE complement constructions.This thesis introduces the current researches on DE complement construction at home and abroad at first,and then gives a brief and systematic classification of DE complement construction.Afterwards it gives a description for the syntactic characteristics of DE,that is,it analyzes DE as an aspect marker,and then introduces the three types of aspects in the three kinds of DE complement constructions respectively.At last,the thesis analyzes the syntactic derivation and motivation of the three kinds of DE complement constructions.On the basis of summarizing the previous studies,this thesis tries to analyze and discuss the research questions from a new perspective and make every effort to make breakthroughs and innovations.By combining qualitative and quantitative methods,this thesis makes a qualitative analysis of the complement sentences by establishing the corpus of the complement sentences introduced after the verb.