The De-marked Modification Structure in Mandarin Chinese

Over the years the nominal construction with marked modifiers in Mandarin Chinese, the so-called de construction, has been one of the most studied topics within the literature of Chinese linguistics. Due to its complicated properties and distributions, a satisfactory account has not yet been achieved that covers all the phenomena observed. In particular, the categorial status of de remains rather vague. Therefore, this paper addresses the issue of the syntactic category of the element de in the nominal domain. It reanimates the idea that in Mandarin Chinese all modifiers in the nominal domain which are accompanied by de are full-fledged relative clauses adjoined to the left of modified phrases by the syntactic operation Adjunction and that the particle de is a head-initial complementiser. The current left-adjunction proposal can better account for the co-ordination of two relative clauses modifying one single nominal phrase in Mandarin Chinese.