Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Head-Quarters Of Mandarin Arguments, Hsin-Lun Huang

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation looks at the syntactic distributions of various Mandarin arguments and develops an argument structure that takes into account the arguments’ semantic types. Theories of argument realization mostly build on a one-to-one correspondence between the syntactic positions of arguments and the thematic relations they bear to the verb in the underlying structure. And this correspondence is rooted in the assumption that the argument positions in the verb’s projection must be saturated before other semantic compositions can take place. This dissertation argues that the saturation requirement can be alleviated, depending on whether languages make a morphological distinction in their syntax. …