A Syntactic Study Of Dummy Pronominal Ta In Chinese

Dummy pronominal ta in the V+ta+XP construction is frequently used in colloquial Mandarin Chinese.It behaves quite differently from the canonical third person singular pronoun ta ‘it/him’ in that it is phonologically reduced and semantically devoid of the actual referent.Most of the previous studies have scarcely investigated the grammatical properties of dummy pronominal ta in a systematic way up to the present,eluding a comprehensive and adequate analysis.Therefore,this thesis aims to explore the grammatical behaviors and the grammatical status of dummy pronominal ta in the V+ta+XP construction.Through the systematic observations to dummy pronominal ta in the V+ta+XP construction,its syntactic distributions and semantic functions are summarized as follows.Syntactically,dummy pronominal ta obligatorily precedes the numeral classifier phrase XP in the V+ta+XP construction.Moreover,only perfective aspect and habitual aspect are available in the V+ta+XP construction.Apart from aspect,priority modality and dynamic modality are also allowed in the smallest finite clause with the V+ta+XP construction.Semantically,dummy pronominal ta denotes the speaker’s subjective attitude/evaluation.First,it plays an emphatic function in conveying the feelings of the speaker/subject to perform the action.Second,its interaction with the numeral classifier phrase(XP)yields an estimated big/small quantity/amount reading in terms of the speaker’s subjective evaluation.Third,in the interaction between subjectivity and aspect,the speaker’s aspectual choices of viewpoint result in the availability of perfective aspect and habitual aspect in the V+ta+XP construction,which further demonstrates the semantic function of dummy pronominal ta in subjectivity encoding.Fourth,dummy pronominal ta in the V+ta+XP construction performs the function of reinforcing the speaker’s/subject’s obligation,desire and purpose under which priority modality is constructed,and conveying the speaker’s subjective judgement over the speaker’s/subject’s ability manifested through dynamic modality.More sentential constraints are found on the V+ta+XP construction to convey the speaker’s subjectivity.For instance,the sentential subject/the speaker should be animate and carry the feature of volitional subjectivity.Moreover,dummy pronominal ta is permitted in imperatives,hypothetical conditionals and yes-no questions which are all relevant to the speaker’s subjectivity.Under the Cartographic Approach,this thesis proposes that dummy pronominal ta encoding the speaker’s subjectivity is maximally projected into its own phrase ta P,the highest phrase at the left periphery of the extended projection of the lexical category(Num P).And the verb further selects ta P as its complement,forming the V+ta+XP(Num P)construction.