A Syntactic Study Of The Chinese Appositive Construction

The appositive construction is a very important construction in Mandarin Chinese,which is acknowledged to exist extensively in many languages.Quite a lot of studies of the appositive construction in other languages have been done,while few studies of the Chinese appositives can be found.In the few studies of the Chinese appositive construction,most are about the semantic and pragmatic functions of this construction,and few about their syntactic properties.This study intends to investigate the syntactic structure of the appositive construction in Chinese on the basis of previous studies.Depending on whether there exists a comma intonation,Chinese appositive constructions can be classified into two categories: close appositives and loose appositives.Based on their semantic interpretation,loose appositives can be further divided into two sub-classes: reformulative appositives and attributive appositives.The former can provide additional and often more informative names for their anchors,while the latter predicate properties of them.Through a series of constituency tests,it is found that close appositives and reformulative appositives behave syntactically the same as the coordination structure,and the attributive apposition show properties of adjunction to an independent clause.To account for the syntactic and semantic properties of the different types of apposition,the internal structure(or the derivation process)of the construction is also explored.It is proposed that close appositives project into a coordination phrases(CoP)headed by the coordinator,with the anchor and the apposition occupying the specifier and the complement respectively.Reformulative appositions also take the form of CoPs,with the apparent DP apposition being an ellipsised independent clause.Attributive appositions are derived from the adjunction of an ellipsised clausal constituent to an independent ForceP,with the ellipsised constituent also taking the form of a DP and phonetically realized in a position immediately following its anchor.