Chinese DE and the DE-construction

Abstract

This paper analyzes the derivations of the DE construction, showing that an antecedent-free DE construction is derived by deverbalization and an antecedent-dependent DE construction is derived by ellipsis. Semantically, the former process is substantivization and the latter defocalization. Relating the antecedent-dependent DE construction to other nominal ellipses and the verb gapping construciton, I discuss a new type of ellipsis which can take an ellipsis site as its linguistic antecedent. Furthermore, I argue that the syntactic status of the word de in a nominal is a functional category, heading an nP consistently.