Argument-omission structures in Mandarin Chinese, including omitting the subject, object and the head of ‘‘de’’ phrase, can be fully explained by Xu Jie’s theory of Generalized Case Theory. Case assigner can be divided into two types: obligatory and optional, among which the nominative Case assigner in English is obligatory, while in Chinese, it is optional. Similarly, the accusative and genitive Case assigner in Mandarin Chinese is also optional. These facts directly lead to the argument-omission structures in Mandarin Chinese. The linguistic principles are surprisingly simple behind the unordered and rich linguistic phenomena, and the only difference among different languages is the values of the parameter in the language faculty.
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School of Foreign Languages, Fuyang Teachers College, Fuyang, 236041, Anhui, China
Yong Yang
Correspondence to Yong Yang .
Editor information Editors and AffiliationsXiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian, China
Xinchun Su
Central China Normal University, Wuhan, Hubei, China
Tingting He
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper Cite this paperYang, Y. (2014). Generalized Case Theory and the Argument-Omission Structure in Mandarin Chinese. In: Su, X., He, T. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8922. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14331-6_44
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Published: 27 December 2014
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-14331-6
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