| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 99 === This thesis focuses on three constructions headed by GEN in Chinese, VP-adjunct, comitative construction and coordinate construction.
The precise syntactic categories of GEN, as a verb, a preposition, a coordinator or others, have been the subject of extensive inquiry from various approaches and perspectives, with sufficient progress and convergence (Tang 1979, Li and Thompson 1981, Gu 2000, Paris 2008 and Zhang 2008 and 2009, Tang 2010, among others). Nevertheless, given the studies, some empirical problems remain unsolved and await better treatment, such as extraction of the first conjunct out of a coordinate construction, which violates the Coordinate Structure Constraint (Ross 1967). Along the same line, two theoretical accounts, and/with alternation (Kayne 1994) and comitative construction in English (Zhang 2006), fail to cover the comitative and coordinate construction in Chinese. Granted this empirical finding and the theoretical inadequacy, I argue for my proposed analyses that can cope with the inadequacy and complement the previous analyses. At last, the proposed analyses are consistent with the path of grammaticalization of GEN.
I have four goals in this thesis. First, having gained a comparative perspective from other languages (Russian and Czech) and employing one syntactic test (Binding Principle A), I demonstrate that there are two types of constructions headed by GEN, comitative and coordinate, with the former being further split into VP-adjunct and comitative coordination which are base-generated at different positions. They are headed by the prepositional GEN and the conjunctive GEN respectively. Second, assuming Kitada (2007a, 2007b) and Zhang (2007), I argue that a prepositional GEN and the conjunctive GEN are dominated by a functional projection (FP) where GEN is realized as an Edge Feature, suggesting that they have the rich internal structure in which the functional head of the phrase triggers syntactic operations, such as Agree and Move. Along the line of this argument, comitativity denoted by a prepositional GEN and distributivity by a conjunctive GEN can be explained in the derivation. Besides, granted this argument, possible extraction of DP1 out of the coordinate structure headed by the conjunctive GEN, not discussed in the studies, can receive an explanatory treatment. Third, employing a formal approach to grammaticalization (van Gelderen 2004, 2006; Roberts and Roussou 1999, 2003), I demonstrate that the grammaticalization of GEN is consistent with three syntactic configurations I proposed respectively. Two principles are operative, the Late Merge Principle and the Feature Economy. Fourth, it is hoped that the proposed analyses can receive substantial support from other languages.
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