| Frequency phrases are found in many languages worldwide,and the word order of frequency phrases and objects has been a hot topic in syntax.Within the framework of generative grammar,particularly the syntactic category theory and part-of-speech feature verification theory,this paper studies frequency phrases Mandarin Chinese in terms of linear order and syntactic derivation,and discusses the syntactic commonality and differences between Frequency phrases and Duration phrases.From the view of dynamic syntax,attempts are made to specify categorial features of frequency words,the derivation frequency phrases and word order formation.First of all,it is pointed out that the verb-object frequency phrases and the duration phrase have different syntactic properties.Among them,the verb-object frequency phrases are supposed to be analyzed as complements,whereas the duration phrases as adjuncts.There are four reasons: First,the particle de cannot be inserted after the momentum phrase,but it can be inserted after duration phrases.The second is that when the object is two groups of noun phrases juxtaposed,frequency phrases have a distributive interpretation,while duration phrase have a collective interpretation.The third is that frequency phrases between the verb and the object are restricted by the characteristics of the subcategory of the verb,while the tense phrases are not restricted by the choice of the verb category.Fourth,phrases of time and quantity between verb and object cannot appear before certain quantity phrases,while Frequency phrases are not restricted.Second,it is argued that the feature matrix of frequency words is [+N,-V,+D].Because we speculate that frequency phrases in Chinese are NPs,which determines its basic part of speech features,but in order to distinguish them from nouns,we add a limited functional feature [+D] to the verb quantifiers,because if a Verb measure words exist in the context of mandarin Chinese,and bare nouns will have definite interpretations without the help of articles.However,the role of verb quantifiers with D features is to quantify verbs,just to enable the predicate verbs in Chinese to obtain grammatical integrity.Moreover,that explains certain contrast between noun frequency phrases and noun in terms of phrases syntactic distribution.Finally,this paper argues that certain ungrammatical order of frequency phrases is caused by a lack of a remedy for verb duplication.Since the object NP and DP bear different feature matrices,the methods of participating in the verification of features are different.The uninterpretable features on NP are checked in the core of VP,and those on DP are checked outside of VP,which determines whether to trigger the verb copying affects the legitimacy of S(subject)+ VP + NP/DP + Frq P.Compared with previous studies,this paper sorts out the basic issues of mandarin Chinese Frequency phrases more systematically and conducts a more in-depth analysis of the underlying word order issues.At the same time,we provide fresh analysis methods to understand this issue.And analysis of other similar problems may provide a new perspective. |
