This paper investigates the licensing condition of the
[Num(eral)-Cl(assifier)-Mod(ifier)-de-N(oun)] / [Mod-de-Num-Cl‑N] variation in Mandarin Chinese.
It is observed that this variation represents a complex interface phenomenon in the nominal domain, which is subject to the
semantic condition concerning the i(ndividual)-level/s(tage)-level nature of the modifier contained on the one hand, and the
discourse-related condition concerning contrastive topic (ct) on the other. Based on this, at the syntax-semantics
interface level, this paper proposes a division of the syntactic domain of adnominal modification to account for the discrepancy
between i‑level and s‑level modifiers in terms of their capability in forming [Mod-de-Num-Cl‑N] in the neutral
context. In the meanwhile, at the syntax-discourse interface level, in light of the interface-induced analysis pursued by Neeleman & Van de Koot (2008) and Horvath
(2010), it is claimed that the word order of [Mod-de-Num-Cl‑N] could be adopted as a linguistic device
to encode ct within the nominal domain in Mandarin Chinese, in which case the ordering of [Mod-de-Num-Cl‑N] is
licensed for the purpose of establishing a transparent mapping between syntactic configuration and information structure.
This paper investigates the semantic and syntactic properties of [N(oun)+de+Q(uantifier)] in Mandarin Chinese. Based on a comparison with the quantitive construction [Q+N], the paper advocates that [N+de+Q] is the Chinese partitive construction. Adopting a clausal approach to the syntactic derivation of partitives, it is hypothesized that Chinese partitives are formed via applying Predicate Inversion to a small clause that features a BELONG-type possession relationship. The difference between Chinese partitives and English-type partitives in terms of the surface word order is a result of a parametric variation with respect to whether the remnant of Predication Inversion undergoes further raising or not.
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