A Study On The Derivational Mechanism Of English Coordinate Compounds From The Perspective Of Distributed Morphology

Coordination Structure(CS)wildly exists in all human languages.This language structure attracts broad attraction of all linguists in the world.Generative Grammar,which takes English as its main research object,has not formed a unified theoretical understanding of the derivation of Coordinate Structure.On account of the undefined morph-syntactic properties of "and",the CS,which takes "and" as its axis,cannot be analyzed through the double-branch syntactic model.Then coordinate structures are always been analyzed as "exocentric structure",which is contradictory to the"endocentric" model in Generative Grammar.Through the observation of English vocabulary,CS not only exists in phrases and sentences,it also appears in English compounds.However,the CS in compounds are not connected by a coordinator.So,does compounds have the same derivation mechanism with phrasal and sentential coordination?Is coordination with or without coordinator same?What is the function of coordinator "and" for coordinate relation?Under the framework of Generative Grammar,the main methodology of this thesis is Distributed Morphology.Based on the key idea "Syntactic Hierarchical Structure All the Way Down",this thesis analyzed the generative process of CS.The major syntactic properties of coordination structure include endocentricity,hierarchy,integrity and productivity.Through the analysis of CS,it is found out that coordination is an abstract generation mechanism of language structure which appears in all levels in languages.As a functional element,it connects the conjuncts through "merge".Based on the coordinate mechanism,this thesis analyzes the structure and derivation of English coordinate compounds.It shows that coordination,as a language mechanism,coordination does not need coordinators,such as "and",however,coordinators embody the coordinate mechanism.For example,"bittersweet","my teacher and friend" and "a book and a pen" are all generated by coordinate mechanism.But,coordination in words is lack of overt coordinator,which can only have two conjuncts;while word’s coordination and phrase’s coordination do need coordinator,such as "and",to reflect its logical relation,because the inner components are relatively independently.In multi-conjuncts coordination,only the last two conjuncts need overt coordinator.Coordination spreads over in all levels in languages.With the help of such mechanism,coordinate compound is formed by two roots merging with each other and then merging with a category-giving head.The meaning of coordinate compound can be predicted from its roots.However,the process of compounding brings about idioms,whose meanings can be interpreted in the Encyclopedia in DM.