Chinese postpositions? --again
再论汉语'后置词'
Thomas Ernst

Abstract 摘要
One controversy in Chinese syntax has been the category status of such ‘locative particles’ as shang or li in zhuozi shang ‘on the table’ or wuzi li ‘in the room’: some scholars have called them postpositions, others have considered them nouns. In this paper I offer arguments for the former position. Whichever alternative is chosen, such words will be atypical members of the category, so it is necessary to specify theoretical mechanisms to account for their atypical properties. If shang, li, etc., are considered nouns, we will be forced to say (a) that head nouns in a highly isolating language may be obligatorily bound, and (b) that a noun may obligatorily have a relational, non-referential function. Both of these devices are extremely unusual and undesirable. On the other hand, if these words are postpositions, the only crucial devices are (c) an unusual subcategorization option, where the preposition zai takes a PP object (in e.g. zai zhuozi shang) and (d) allowing adpositions to follow their objects, in a language where verbs and prepositions normally precede their objects. I show that both (c) and (d) may be accommodated fairly easily in syntactic theory, and that therefore we are dealing with genuine (albeit somewhat unusual) postpositions.

‘上’，‘里’等“方位词”（如在‘桌上’，‘屋里’中）的类属是中文语法中有争议的问题之一。有些学者把它们称为‘后置词’，也有人把它们视为名词。本文支持前一种看法。无论把这些词归入哪一类，它们在该类中都会是非典型的成员。因此，必须明确用什么样的理论机制才能解释这些词的非典型特征。如果把‘里’‘上’等词当作名词，那就只好说（a）在孤立语中，中心名词可以是强制附着的；（b）有些名词可以有纯关系性，非指涉性的功能。这两种方法都难以令人满意。但如果把这些词看作‘后置词’那么需要补充的机制就只有（c）一种特殊的下位范畴分类，即在‘在’后可以加pp宾语（如：在桌子上）；（d）在宾语后允许介词。（中文里介词通常出现在宾语之前.）可以证明，（c）和（d）在句法理论中是相当容易接受的；因此，‘上’，‘里’等词应该是名副其实（尽管有些异常）的‘后置词’。

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