Abstract
This thesis focuses on two kinds of elided structures, ellipsis and gapping.In English VP ellipsis requires the presence of an auxiliary, while since there is no do-support in Chinese, one may simply assume that ellipsis does not happen in Chinese. However, I argue here that there are four syntactic configurations (shi-support, negation, modals, verbs) involving ellipsis in Chinese should be distinguished, which serve the same purpose as that of do-support in English. Moreover, ellipsis in Chinese can be captured under a focus-based analysis of ellipsis in which Focus Projection (FP) may be projected above VP or above IP; in this way, the Principle of Full Interpretation and Ellipsis Licensing Condition can both be satisfied. This ellipsis configuration is basically applicable to other languages, interacting with some language-specific mechanisms.Verb gapping, which is a common practice in English as well as in many languages, is demonstrated here to be non-existent in Mandarin Chinese. Furthermore, I distinguish the genuine gapping from the quasi-gapping construction as found in Chinese, which, according to my analysis, should be the topic-comment construction in which the event argument serves as the covert topic. Finally, through diachronic comparison with Classical Chinese and synchronic comparison with English, I demonstrate that the non-existence of verb gapping in Modern Chinese might arise from its intrinsic lack of VP coordination.