A Syntactic Study On Chinese Dou Sentences

The thesis is a study of the syntax of the Chinese dou sentences within the framework of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1993; 1995). We mainly intend to answer three questions about the Chinese dou sentences: (i) what are the constraints on the dou-quantiflable NPs (ii) what is the nature of dou" And (iii) can multiple strong NPs get distributive readings within one sentence" Firstly, we formulate three constraints: (a) the syntactic constraint, (b) the semantic constraint of the predicate and (c) the strong NP. constraint. By doing this, we could render the readers a clear picture of the dou-quantifiable NPs. As to the second question, we adopt Li's (1997) treatment of dou as a functional head of the Distributive Projection (DistP) whose significance is further proved by Wu's (1998) analysis of the derivations of various dou sentences. As to the third problem, we argue that multiple strong NPs can be quantified by dou within one sentence. In order to account for this issue, we propose the "Multiple Specifiers Analysis of Dou-quantification" based on Koizumi's (1995) and Ura's (1994) "Multiple Specifier Analysis"proposed for the Wh-fronting in Bulgarian and Multiple Subjects in Indonesian respectively. In this way, we provide a nice solution to the multiple distributive reading of strong NPs within one dou sentence.