A Study Of Possessor Raising Sentences

(1)a．张三的一条腿断了。Zhang San de yi tiao tui duan le.Zhang San's one leg broke ASP'One of Zhang San's legs has broken.'b．张三断了一条腿。Zhang San duan le yi tiao dui.Zhang San broke ASP one leg.'Zhang San has broken one of his legs.'c．张三的腿断了一条。Zhang San de tui duan le yi tiao.Zhang San's leg broke ASP one.'Zhang San's legs have broken one.'In the generative grammar study, sentences in (1) are def'med in the literature aspossessor raising sentences. Linguists have used a range of theories to discuss thistopic, such as the "Adjacency Principle" concerning the movement, "Case Theory"about the case assignment on the nominal phrase, "Binding Principle", "ThemTheory" and the "Unaccusativity of Verbs" and so on.Xu(1999) defines the feature of these sentences as, (2a) The nominalelement before and after the verb must have the relation of possessive/subordinate or part/whole; (2b) On one hand, the verb in these sentences hasno capability of assigning case; on the other hand, the noun after it needs to be assigned case.Linguists have done a lot of work on (1a) and (1b). In my thesis, we intendto put (1c) into study. We make proposals in my thesis as follows. (3a) ZhangSan merges with yi tiao tui 'a leg' in the lexicon because of theirintrinsic possessive relation. (3b) yi tiao tui 'a leg' presents differentcategories in these three sentences. In (1a) and (1b), it is a NumP, denotingquantity; in (1c), it is a DP, denoting individual. There is a FocP projectedunder the node of D for an emphatic value as well as the indefiniteinterpretation. This analysis is consistent with the feature of Chinese language,which usually has the end-focus. (3c) In the lexical argument structure, duan'break' moves to the upper V level to assign its internal argument Zhang San deyi tiao tui 'one of Zhang San's legs' the lexical case. Then either Zhang San orZhang San de yi tiao tui 'one of Zhang San's legs' moves to spec-IP position toget the nominative case. Its lexical case is left toyi tiao tui 'a leg'.