Analysis of the noun phrase in Chinese and comparative study with Spanish

Abstract

The Determiner Phrase Hypothesis proposed by Abney (1987) was thought as an important theory of Universal Grammar and has raised great interests in Chinese linguistics. Many studies (Li, 1996, 1998; Cheng y Sybesma, 1998; Liu, 2002; Wen, 2010) focus on verifying whether such a hypothesis suits for Chinese, a language without system of article, yet more evidence of cross language studies still are in need. In this paper, we analyzed the different structures of nominal phrases in Chinese that are able to express, respectively, the indefiniteness, definiteness and genericity. These analyses provided more evidence which could verify that the Determiner Phrase Hypothesis is also applicable for Chinese in which the head could be the numeral yī (one), the demonstrative zhè/nà (this/that) or even the classifier depending on specific cases. To provide further proof, this paper also discussed the properties of the bare nouns of Chinese in order to find the possibility of their appearance in different syntactic positions and their different semantic references.