Noun Clitic:On the Syntactic Status of Chinese Monosyllabic Locative Particles
The different usages of Chinese monosyllabic locative particle correspond to different syntactic status.Theories regarding them as postposition or noun cannot fully explain the phonetic attachment of post-position particles.Chinese monosyllabic locative particles that attached to a noun component take a wide scope syntactically and semantically,retain the syntactic status of a noun,but they have the phonetic attachment,so they have the syntactic status of noun clitic.The mismatch between phonetic and syntactic properties of clitic reflects the dual attributes of clitic(affix and word).Chinese monosyllabic locative particles that attached to a noun component retain noun status rather than postpositions;the locative phrase is not a prepositional phrase,but a locative noun phrase.Locative noun phrases are different from ordinary nouns.They can serve as both subject/object and adverbial.They have dual functions.This can naturally explain the phenomenon that locative phrase can be used as adverbial.It is not true that only prepositional phrase can be used as adverbials.Chinese locative phrase can be used as adverbial,but that cannot prove that they are postpositional phrases.Linguistic components often have dual nature.In discriminating the syntactic statuses of Chinese linguistic components,it is necessary to make use of the combination of phonetic,semantic,syntactic(numeration-classifier collocation,etc.)means.
monosyllabic locative particlesmismatchcliticdual statusdual function