A Minimalist Approach To Sluicing In Mandarin Chinese

This thesis concentrates on the properties of Mandarin sluicing structures.Sluicing is firstly noticed by Ross(1969),defined as a phonetically defective while semantically complete clause.Syntactically,sluicing involves a wh-word or wh-phrase,whose internal structure is a complete clause in form of an interrogative question.Although Mandarin Chinese lacks overt morphological markers,it can be observed from the licensing conditions and selectional restrictions of the predicate that Mandarin sluicing is also a complete clause in syntax.In the Minimalist Program,English sluicing structures mainly have two ways of analysis:non-structural and structural analysis.Non-structural analysis claims that the wh-word exists in isolation,without the deletion operation of a complete structure.Structural analyses hold that the wh-word is a remnant after the deletion of a complete clause,which subsumes two routes:LF-Copying and PF-Deletion analysis.The former assumes the wh-word to be base-generated and the semantic meaning is recovered by copying that of the antecedent clause,whereas the latter claims that the wh-word is a result of deletion at the phonetic level.Both non-structural and structural analyses,though being explanatorily adequate to English sluicing,are not fully applicable to Mandarin sluicing.Formal linguistics investigates Mandarin sluicing mainly from three perspectives:Movement analysis,Reduced-cleft analysis and Pseudo-sluicing analysis.Movement analysis is derived from the PF-Deletion analysis in English,assuming wh-movement and deletion of other constituents.The Reduced-cleft analysis considers Mandarin sluicing to be reduced-cleft constructions.This thesis adopts the Pseudo-sluicing analysis,proposed originally by Adams(2004),Adams&Tomioka(2012)and Wei(2004,2011).Under this analysis,Mandarin sluicing involves a phonologically null pro,functioning nominally or eventually.The empty category functions syntactically as the subject of the elided clause and behaves like an anaphor whose content is recovered through the antecedent clause.This analysis maintains the pro-drop property of Mandarin Chinese.Additionally,the wh-remnant in sluiced clause is base-generated and is co-indexed with its correlate in the antecedent clause,conforming to the Principle of Economy.Due to the introduction of pro,deletion at the phonetic level is no longer necessary,avoiding the contradiction between establishing a theory of wh-movement plus deletion and the wh-in-situ property of Mandarin Chinese.Within the pseudo-sluicing perspective,this thesis discusses and aims to answer the following three research questions:(1)What are the characteristics of Mandarin sluicing?(2)Why does Mandarin sluicing exhibit such distinctions compared with English sluicing?(3)How are the missing elements in Mandarin sluicing semantically interpreted?The first research question aims to illustrate the similarities and differences between Mandarin sluicing and its English counterpart.Besides,the issue of shi-support,island effects and selectional restrictions are illustrated respectively.From the predicational view,this thesis considers the copula shi 'be' as a result of predication.For island effects,the differences between two languages on the amelioration of LBC are discussed,finding that Mandarin sluicing is more extensive in overcoming the LBC.As for the selectional restrictions of the predicate,Chinese and English resembles a lot.The second research question targets the syntactic status of the copula shi'be' in Chinese sluicing and ungrammaticality of sluicing with zenme(yang)'how'.Meantime,this thesis analyzes some puzzling data under the currently proposed analysis and offers some explanations.The last research question centers on the interpretation of the elided clause.Based on Chung et al.'s(2011)research for English sluicing,this thesis offers a reasonable account of the semantic recoverability for Mandarin sluicing.Based on the data and the research,this thesis finds that Mandarin sluicing resembles its English counterpart in the presence of antecedent clause,indefinite correlate and voice identification.However,the copula shi 'be' in Mandarin sluicing is obligatorily present when the wh-phrase in the sluiced clause functions as an argument,but is optionally present when the wh-phrase is an adjunct.Additionally,Mandarin sluicing with zenme(yang)'how' is ungrammatical,demanding the presence of the nominalized predicate in the antecedent clause or other light verbs.As for island effects,Mandarin sluicing could accommodate more LBC violations than English.According to the data,this thesis claims that predicates in Mandarin sluicing are mostly psycho verbs like zhidao 'know',mingbai 'understand',and that only predicates that s-select a question and c-select a CP could license the grammaticality of sluicing.Under the pseudo-sluicing perspective,this thesis observes that as the subject of the sluiced clause,the syntactically null pro could form a binding relation with either the correlate in the antecedent clause or the whole antecedent clause,from which the empty pronoun pro could get its semantic interpretation.As for the interpretation of the whole sluiced clause,it is based on the semantic interpretation of the antecedent clause in the surrounding linguistic environment.This thesis claims that any lexical items that have not been numerated during the construction of the antecedent clause should not be used in the semantic recovery of the sluiced clause.For the syntactic status of the copula shi'be' in Mandarin sluicing,this thesis is on a par with Wei(2004),believing that the presence of the copula shi 'be' depends on whether the wh-phrase itself is predicative or not.