The Syntactic Position Of Chinese Adjunct

The concept of adjunct refers to the modifier in a sentence or its predicate constituent and is mainly used within the framework of Generative Grammar.The main purpose of this research is to build an all-round theory about the distribution of adjunct, including the following aspects:First, as a proper theory of adjunct, our research aims to predict correctly the possible positions of all potential adjuncts in a sentence. Since adjunct stands in the fringe part of the basic predicate-argument structure of a sentence, its status and role remains unclear in the present study of the syntactic and semantic composition of a sentence. It is argued in this dissertation that the actual difference between adjunct, specifier and complement is not so substantial as generally believed; their different syntactic performance only results from their different entry in process of merging, which is thought to be the most primary syntactic operation.Secondly, by means of discussions on the position of adjunct, this dissertation targets at diversifying and enriching the hypotheses and theories about the syntax-semantics interface. It is believed that the position of adjunct unfolds the pertinence between the syntactic and semantic structure, and as a result, the study of adjunct positions will necessarily inspire the interface theory, provide another opportunity for comprehending the nature of syntactic and semantic interface.The third target is to diminish the prescriptive effects of syntax and make the whole theory have more universal significance. Three factors are argued to determine the potential position of an adjunct, its lexical semantics, nature of compositional rules and lexical phonetics.The final target is to set an appropriate categorial system for adjuncts, because it is thought that a consistent categorial system, especially a proper categorizing criterion, will enhance our comprehension of adjuncts.This dissertation consists of the following six chapters.Based on an introduction and discussion of different views on adjunct, such as viewing adjunct as complement, specifier or completely different them, the first chapter makes a brief introduction of the main standpoint of this research. Chapter two mainly explores the up-to-date development of Chomsky's linguistic philosophy, which is also the academic background for this study on position of adjunct.The third chapter demonstrates some syntactic theoretical hypotheses, such as'feature percolation','head movement'and'predicate raising', all of which are used to illustrate the universals and parametric differences related to adjuncts in different languages, including Modern Chinese, Modern Standard English, Early Modern English in Shakespeare's time, as well as Modern French. Based on Dowty's Thematic Proto-role Theory, it is pointed out that there are quite a lot of intermediates among adjuncts, specifiers and complements and these intermediates constitute a continuum.On the basis of Lu Jianming and Si Fuzhen's researches, Chapter Four points out that the adjunct structure should be analyzed in the same way as analyzing the modifying DE construction, namely DE is the head, the adjunct occupies the specifier position and the modified part is the complement.Meanwhile, the distinction between syntactic headwords and semantic headwords has been greatly emphasized. Suppose a word belongs to the functional categories, its lexical semantic feature can be noted as [-N,-V]. As to adjuncts, it can either be noted as DE1 (notation by Zhu Dexi) or [DE]v (notation by Nowak Culicuver), both of which are parallel and corresponding.The syntactic performance of DE is determined by its features in three aspects, namely the specifier feature, the head feature and complement feature.The phonetic structure of FEICHANG DE TONGKUAI can be noted as [FEICHANG DE] [TONGKUAI], its syntactic structure as [FEICHANG] [DE TONGKUAI], and its semantic structure as [DE] [FEICHANG TONGKUAI]. It is argued that these three kinds of structures are distinct and inter-related.Chapter Five is about the classification of adjuncts and some issues concerning syntax-semantics interface. Semantically, adjuncts can be divided into three categories, namely V'adjuncts, VP adjuncts and TP adjuncts. It is argued that these semantic categories to some extent regulate their different syntactic distributions.The sixth chapter argues that the component'A not A"in Chinese iterative questions is basically generated in the node of INFL. The classification of V'adjunct, VP adjunct and TP adjunct can be employed to explain the syntactic location of adjuncts in Chinese iterative questions. The different domain nature of adjuncts will determine their distribution in iterative questions.