張寧 Niina Ning Zhang

A Syntactician Explains What People Don’t Know They Know

I explore the underlying natural laws of human language by testing hypotheses about sentence structure. One of my achievements in the past six years of research on my National Science and Technology Council projects is Coordinate Structures (2023, Cambridge University Press), wherein I claim that the structures of coordination (e.g., “Snow is white and grass is green” ) and modification (e.g., “the green grass” ) can be unified into a single structure type. I find that the special abstract elements essential to both structures, namely conjunctions like English “and” in coordination and the Mandarin Chinese modification marker de （的, 地, 得）, share many structural properties. Cross-linguistic differences are also explainable in terms of these abstract elements: unlike English, Chinese has many different conjunctions (e.g., 和, 跟, 以及, 並且, 又 ), while unlike Chinese, English does not have any modification markers at all. Other recent research achievements include my explanation of the syntax of comparative correlative constructions (e.g., 文章越短越難寫 ), which are unusual in that they depend on pairings like yue-yue in Chinese and “the more…the more” in English, and my demonstration that non-canonical objects in Chinese (e.g., 我們來吃這家餐廳, where we won’t literally eat the restaurant!) actually classify event types, as opposed to individual event tokens, which occur when the verb is used as a special type of intransitive verb (e.g., when 吃 just refers to the act of eating). This last research study has now led me to consider how syntax represents event types, in addition to the much better studied entity types, thus shedding new light on the structure of mental representations in the human cognitive system.