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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Motivation of the Study
The collocation of adjectives and nouns is an interesting topic in Chinese. Whythere must be a “de” between adjectives and nouns sometimes? Why sometimes thereare not? Why will it be both acceptable whether de exists or not sometimes? Is [AN]structure a compound or a noun phrase? All those have been hot topics since 1980s.Most related papers were studied from syntax and focused on the function of de. Forexample, de can be seen as grammatical marker (Huang, 1982), case assigner (Li,1985), type marker (Cheng, 1986, 1997; Lu, 2017) and so on. But, few papersdiscuss its semantic type and semantic function. In English, type theory is widelyapplied to analyze adjectival modification. However, in Chinese, few researchesstudy this topic from the perspective of semantic type theory. Hence, I wonder if wecan provide some supplementary evidences from the perspective of formal semantictheories to interpret de’s semantic function. In addition, I really want to know howformal composition works in the collocation of adjectives and nouns, and what thesemantic type of Chinese adjectives is.Based on previous studies, we find Huang’s hypothesizes (2006, 2008) cannotinterpret the combination of [SA de N] structure. Therefore, we try to mend thedeficiencies of her Proposals, and explain the differences between [AN] compoundsand [AN] phrases from semantic features.
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1.2 Objectives of the Study
The purposes of this thesis are to explore the semantic function of de and findout the semantic types of de and Chinese adjectives. Thus, both [A de N] structureand [AN] structure will be studied respectively.First, this thesis will closely study on adjectives in Chinese, including their classification and semantic types. Second, the syntactic and semantic status of de willbe addressed and the differences between [AN] structure and [A de N] structure willalso be explored to show why there exist the presence and absence of de. Third, if wewant to figure out the semantic function and the semantic types of adjectives and de,we have to dig out the semantic type of common nouns in Chinese. Therefore, wewill follow most linguists’ views about the semantic type of commons nouns inChinese. In this paper, the study of de only confines to de3 (see the specificexplanation in Chapter 2.2) and adjectives in the thesis only concern aboutmono-adjectival modifiers.
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Chapter Two literature review

2.1 Introduction
Generally, adjectives in Chinese Mandarin can appear in two forms: bare A or[A de]. Many linguists have studied the differences between them from differentaspects, especially from semantics and syntax. It is more complicated that de alsoplays an important role in adjectival modification. This paper tries to use formalsemantic methods to show their semantic relations and their own semantic functions.For those reasons, this literature review will introduce six parts. The first part isabout the classification of Chinese adjectives. The second part will concern about theclassification of de. The third part will review the previous studies on Chineseadjectival modification. The fourth part will revisit the previous studies on semantictypes of adjectives in Chinese. The fifth part will retrospect the previous studies onChinese common nouns. Finally, the merits and the limitations of those reviewedpapers will be discussed.
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