A Formal Syntactic Study of NP-Ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese

This paper discusses NP-ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese involving “ de” and classifiers.On account of the historical origin of “ de”, this paper suggests that two types of “ de” exist in Mandarin Chinese, namely the light noun “ de” and the linking word “ de”.The former constitutes independent “ de” constructions, while the latter forms “ de” noun phrases.On the basis of Hankamer & Sag's (1976) distinction between “deep anaphor” and “surface anaphor”, this paper proposes that independent “ de” constructions and elliptical constructions of classifier phrases belong to “deep anaphora”, while “ de” noun phrases involving PF deletion can be classified as “surface anaphor”.