A Syntactic And Semantic Study Of Non-referential Pronominal ‘Ta’ In Chinese

In Mandarin Chinese,there is a non-referential pronominal ta which behaves quite differently from that of the canonical third person singular pronoun ta ‘him/it’.Syntactically,non-referential pronominal ta obligatorily precedes the numeral classifier phrase.Semantically,non-referential pronominal ta lacks the antecedent in the sentence,so it lacks the corresponding information of ‘number’ and ‘gender’,only retains the information of ‘third person’.Pragmatically,the main function of non-referential pronominal ta is to express the speaker’s subjective attitude/evaluation.This thesis tries to give an explanation to the above special syntactic and semantic expressions of non-referential pronominal ta.This thesis argues that personal pronouns are not as simple as they appear but have a complex internal structure,which is consistent with the academic research views on pronouns in recent years.Although non-referential pronominal ta and the third person singular pronoun ta ‘he’ are the same on the surface,there are great differences in their internal syntactic structure.It is these differences that leads to the special grammatical expression of non-referential pronominal ta.Based on the theoretical framework of Nanosyntax,the lexical trees of different personal pronouns vary in their size.This thesis argues that the lexical tree of non-referential pronominal ta is a subtree of the third person singular pronoun ta ‘he’.The third person singular pronoun ta ‘he’ can spell-out three features simultaneously,namely the [+Def] feature under the D head,the [+Sg] feature under the Num1 head,and the [+Person] feature under the person head.However,non-referential pronominal ta can only spells out the [+Person] feature in person head.That is,compared with the third person singular pronoun ta ‘him’,the syntactic structure of non-referential pronominal ta is incomplete.The non-referential pronominal ta has lost the status of personal pronoun and is more like a modal particle.In addition,semantically non-referential pronominal ta is devoid of the actual referent and encodes the speaker’s subjective attitude/evaluation.This thesis argues that such subjectivity may be licensed by the attitude phrase in CP layer.