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”.