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Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1Rationale of the Study
Over  the  previous  half  century,  Chomsky’s  generative  grammar  has  received  great attention  by  many  linguists.  These  linguists  try  to  enrich  Chomsky’s  theory  and  further explore  the  commonalities  and  the  specialties  of  different  languages.  Some  of  them  even received  the  recognition  of  Chomsky,  such  as  Svenonius  (2003)’s  examination  of  the motivations  and  background  for  cycle  in  linguistic  theory  and  its  relationship  to  locality. However, compared with nouns and verbs, only a few people devote themselves to the study of adjectives in generative perspectives. And many classic problems do not have unanimous answers. The following adjective-noun combination in several languages will help us better understand the situations.As we can see from (1), in Greek and English, adjectives precede the noun they modify while in Spanish, adjectives are after the nouns they modify. And it is interesting to notice that even within the same language, such as French, adjectives can be located before or after the nouns. In English, despite the fact that many adjectives precede the nouns they modify, some adjectives’ positions can be varied.   In  (2a)  and  (2b),  adjectives  precede  the  nouns  they  modified.  In  (2c),  the  adjective  is placed  after the noun  it modifies.  Also,  adjectives  in  (2)  indicate different  closeness  to  the nouns. Chinese in (2a)seems to serve as the subject of the nouns. It has a close relationship with the noun. Kind in (2b) denotes the quality of the noun but do not serve as the subject of the noun. Different from the adjectives in (2a) and (2b), proud in (2c) is placed after the noun and it co-occurs with the prepositional phrase.  
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1.2 Research Questions 
Within  the  framework  of  phase  theory,  I  try  to  explore  the  following  four  questions. They are shown below. (1) What is the syntactic status of adjectives? (2) How to classify adjectives in noun phrases? (3) What is the base position of adjectives? (4) What  are  the  procedures  of  the  derivation  of  adjective  phases  in  nominal  phrases within phase theory? Adjectives from Germanic languages, Romance languages and Chinese will be explored. These  adjectives  will  be  analyzed  in  the  nominal  phrases  to  answer  the  four  questions mentioned above.  
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Chapter 2 A Review of Related Literature 

2.1Abney’s Analysis of Adjectives 
Prenominal  adjectives,  according  to  Abney  (1987),  should  be  taken  as  heads  of  noun phrases. On the one hand, “prenominal descriptive adjectives are the nominal equivalent of auxiliaries in the verb phrase, and as such a本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。