An Optimality Theoretic Description on the Characteristics of Postpositions in Mandarin Chinese

An Optimality Theoretic Description on the Characteristics of Postpositions in Mandarin Chinese

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In this paper, we adopt optimality theory to describe some important properties of postpositions.First, they follow the complement in their own projections.Second, they select either an NP or a PrepP as the complement, but they do not select another PostP as the complement to avoid the adjacency of two postpositions.Third, when occurring in a VP, they essie pink glove precede the head verb if they are complements of verbs and follow the verb if they are adjuncts.Fourth, the insertion of de between a postposition and its complement is prohibited.

Fifth, postpositional stranding is disallowed.As will be dark red masquerade mask shown in this paper, by using OT as the theoretical framework, we establish a theoretical model that is able to account for the syntactic properties, configurations, and restrictions involving the category of postpositions.Finally, this paper provided a brief cross-linguistic generalization of syntactic properties related to postposition between Mandarin Chinese and English from the perspective of OT.