Abstract
The aim of this thesis is to provide a comprehensive account for Chinese temporal “when” clauses. There are three Chinese correspondents to English when-clauses; they are de shihou clauses, shi clauses, and dang clauses. Our focus is to explore the structures and meanings of these Chinese temporal “when” clauses. First of all, we propose that the de shihou clause is not a typical de relative clause but an appositive clause due to incompatibility with NP-ellipsis. Regarding to the shi clause, after reviewing the characteristics of shi, we conclude that shi is a bound root noun. Furthermore, we assume it is a clitic. The third kind of temporal clauses is the dang clause. We propose that dang is a preposition, similar to zai, and takes either a CP or a NP complement denoting a time interval. Besides, we discover that in conditional dang clauses, namely "dang P, Q", P has to temporally precede Q, and a direct cause-and-effect relation between P and Q is required. Such a relationship is the factor allowing dang to assume the sense of conditionality.