Author Description

This empirical study investigates complex Mandarin noun phrases (NP) in actual spoken discourse, with special emphasis on the adnominal possessive phrases and the classifier phrases. In investigating the structure of the Mandarin noun phrase, the author finds that there are two highly interesting phenomena which merit special attention: the functional behavior of the particle de in adnominal phrases and the use of classifiers. The particle de is observed to play a crucial role in the syntactic configuration of the Mandarin NP: apart from connecting two elements together, it can occur with all the possible modifying elements and makes explicit the modification relationship such an element bears to the head noun in a complex NP. The use of the classifier turns out to be the most conspicuous typological feature of Mandarin. In view of their significance, the phenomena involving the particle de and the classifier will be scrutinized in chapters two and three, respectively.