Clitic Analysis of Locative Particles
汉语方位词的分析
Feng-Hsi Liu 刘凤樨

Abstract 摘要
The syntactic status of locative particles such as shang ‘on’, li ‘in’ has long been a problem in Chinese syntax. This paper reviews the properties of these particles and considers three approaches that have been proposed in the literature. We will show that all three approaches run into difficulty. We will then suggest that locative particles are best treated as clitics. They take the preceding NP as the scope and cliticize to the left. This analysis explains why locative particles cannot stand alone, why they do not behave exactly like nouns or postpositions, and it also gives the correct semantic interpretation for locative phrases containing complex NPs. Our analysis suggests that locative particles actually do not have a syntactic status; they are not assigned any syntactic category. Rather, they can be analyzed in a morphological theory which treats clitics as phrasal affixes.

汉语方位词如“上”“里”等在语法中应该属于哪一词是长久以来语言学者所争论的问题之一。本文归纳方位词的各种特性，同时比较目前所有的三家说法。我们认为方位词既不是名词，也不是后置词，而是一种词组尾，紧跟在名词词组的后面。这样的分析可以解释为什么方位词不能独自出现，以及为什么它的表现和名词及后置词都不一样。因此方位词不具有语法上的地位，它在语法上并不具有任何词性。

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