A Syntactic Study Of Quantifier Floating Between English And Chinese Under The Minimalist Program

The essential issues in quantifier floating and the periphery properties have raised heated debates in syntactic history.Quantifier floating refers to the fact that quantifiers can move out of their associates and appear at other positions,and the quantificational relationships between the two are logically equivalent.According to the systematical and comprehensive studies,lots of scholars,domestic and abroad,have conducted thorough analyses to the floating quantifiers for many years;meanwhile,plenty of remarkable achievements have been made.Several remaining questions still trigger a controversial debate as to the syntactic derivations of the floating constructions.Most importantly,the linguists tend to focus on the syntactic mechanisms of one single language,therefore,the comparison between English floating quantifiers and Chinese floating quantifiers is under discussion based on the framework of Minimalist Program.Studies of such field are limited.Based on the previous studies,the thesis mainly centers on the following questions:(1)Where are the syntactic statuses of floating quantifiers between English and Chinese?(2)How are the different types of floating configurations derived between English and Chinese under Minimalist Program?(3)What are the main differences and similarities of the derivational mechanisms between English and Chinese floating structures?At first,the thesis has investigated the syntactic statuses of floating quantifiers between English and Chinese.Quantifiers are selective to their syntactic orders,but never to the argument positions.The strong or weak distributive feature accounts for the differences in syntactic statuses of floating quantifiers between English and Chinese.Focus-related floating quantifier lands at the head of functional projection Focus Phrase for the requirement of feature checking.English floating quantifiers generally occur in the heads of functional projections,i.e.,Quantifier and Focus or Distributive.Chinese floating quantifiers occupy the heads of Quantificational Phrase and Focus Phrase.Then,the approach of Minimalist Program is applied to expounding the syntactic derivation of the quantified constructions between English and Chinese.The unique lexical features of Chinese words allow that the Noun Phrase can be modified by quantifier and determiner,corresponding to a symmetric configuration,that is,{Quantificational Phrase,Determiner Phrase}.The result of merging operations requires that the intermediate step of movement occurs in need of label determination.The stranded element labels the configuration,as required.However,such symmetric configuration disallows to be formed via movement and merging operation in English.Meanwhile,of-deletion mechanism confirms that syntactic feature is hierarchically organized.Different quantifiers are subject to different feature compositions,for instance,the quantificational feature of each is not equivalent to all.Finally,the thesis demonstrates the differences and similarities of quantifier floating between English and Chinese,mainly from the following aspects.Firstly,different floating quantifications account for the similarities and differences in the syntax of quantifier floating between English and Chinese.In instances of floating configurations,both English and Chinese floating quantifiers appear at the heads of their functional projections.Secondly,the syntactic orders influence the syntax of quantified configurations as the requirement of labeling computation.What is more,the locality restrictions in Chinese configurations keep incompatible with English configurations.For instance,movement of QP in Chinese may violate the locality restrictions,but the generated sentence is grammatical.