“台上坐着主席团”的生成路径新探

A New Investigation into the Syntactic Mechanism of Generating Sentences like “Taishang zuo-zhe zhuxituan”

存现句一直是国内外语法学界研究的热点之一,尤其是汉语存现句更为复杂。本文首先梳理了生成语法框架下的前人研究成果,并指出已有研究中尚未解决的一些问题。接着,从信息结构的角度重新探讨了"台上坐着主席团"的生成机制。在对"台上坐着主席团"及其同义句式进行句法推导之前,主要讨论了两个问题:(一)本文质疑前人关于"主语均为有定成分"的说法,认为占据[Spec,TopP]位置的话题须为有定成分,而主语并无指称限制;占据[Spec,FocP]位置的离位焦点须为无定成分。(二)本文提出,句子在实现话题和焦点时应遵循TP主语移位原则和离位焦点优先实现原则。最后通过推导发现,"台上"是话题,"主席团"右向上移,成为离位焦点;"台上坐着主席团"跟"主席团坐在台上"是同源的,但跟"主席团在台上坐着"却不同源。同时,对已有研究中一些棘手的问题,作出了统一的解释。

Existential sentences have always been one of the hot topics in recent linguistic research, and Chinese existential sentences are even more so due to their more complex properties. This paper will review the most prominent studies of Chinese existential sentences in the literature under the framework of Generative Grammar, and point out some controversial issues related to them. On the basis of previous studies, the paper will focus on the generative mechanisms of these sentences from the perspective of information structure, taking"Taishang zuo-zhe zhuxituan" as an example. It is suggested that the topic in the [Spec,TopP] position must be definite and the end-focus in the [Spec,FocP] position must be indefinite, though the subject in the [Spec,TP]position does not observe such restrictions. Two important information encoding principles will be proposed to constrain the realization of topic and focus, as they are related to the existential sentences in question. It will be shown that taishang ‘on the stage’ is a topic and zhuxituan ‘the executive committee’ is an inverted subject,being the end focus of the sentence. In addition, it is found that "Taishang zuo-zhe zhuxituan" and "zhuxituan zuo-zai taishang" are of the same deep structure, and different from "zhuxituan zaitaishang zuo-zhe". Finally,some unresolved questions related to the existential sentence in Chinese will be discussed and a unified explanation will be explored at the end of the paper.