| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班 === 97 === The fundamental assumption of this thesis is that numbers are sums. This means that numerical expressions are primarily composed of notations for the arithmetical operation of addition that exists outside the ordinary syntax of language. Hurford (1975, 2003), the most eminent researcher of numerical expressions, calls this external system “the grammar of numbers,” and he makes little attempt to integrate this external grammar with the ordinary syntax of language. This thesis, however, does attempt to account for numerical expressions within the framework of standard X-bar theory. To do this, it must be recognized that numerals exist as word strings that are free of context and that are arranged as paratactic concatenations. Moreover, it must be recognized that all numerals, even small lexical numerals, should be categorized syntactically as abstract nouns. Furthermore, when numerals are combined through addition they form nominal compounds. It follows, then, that co-ordination offers the best syntactical interpretation of numerical expressions. This thesis argues that numerical expressions can be configured as conjunction phrases (ConjP) of a specifically cumulative type called “and” phrases (&P). Specifically, it is argued that numerical expressions are best configured by following Munn’s (1993) analysis of &P, or what he calls the Boolean Phrase (BP), as right node adjunction. This configuration works well for English numerical expressions, because the conjunction “and” is integral to such expressions at PF, but the &P configuration is problematic for Chinese numerical expressions, because the conjunction you that heads the phrase remains covert. In the end, this thesis suggests evidence that the &P analysis does work for both English and Chinese numerical expressions, despite the apparent problem of the covert & in Chinese numerals.
Keywords: abstract noun; co-ordination; X-bar theory; conjunction phrase (ConjP); adjunction
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