The Chinese" de construction" has always been a research concern of Chinese linguists, who dispute heatedly on the nature
of de and the inner structure of " de construction". Some of them divide the "empty word" de into different morphemes while others merge them into one morpheme without any pertinent reasons. The present study presents a new idea of unifying most de morphemes into a unique morpheme De by showing the intrinsic nominal feature of " DeP construction" and its common inner structure characterized by the setup of a variable - operator relationship.
The study first provides a comparison between the Chinese " DeP construction" and the English
relative clause. Syntactically speaking, both of them have Complementizer as the head which has the same strong <+NOM> feature, but assumes different parameters in English and in Chinese: in English, the < +NOM> feature of Complementizer is expressed as < + wh> while in Chinese it is expressed as < +Ne> (i. e., Null Entity) . Functionally speaking, both can be used as the subject, object, predicate or attributive. Semantically speaking, both assume an operator-variable relationship. In a word, they are based on the same mechanism of relativization.
The study further compares the semantic computation of the predicate ion of English relative clauses and Chinese " DeP construction". Inspired by Heim & Kratzer's Predicate ion Rule (PA) (1998) for the interpretation of English relative clauses, we get the Predicate ion Rule for the reading of the Chinese " DeP construction" which goes like this: If a is a branching node whose daughters are 8 and PI, where p is an Empty Operator, and b is a branching node whose daughters are b and De , and ie IN, then for any variable assignment a, a =X e De.
ax/i.
According to this rule and other basic rules in semantics, " DeP construction" can be further reduced to a lambda function: x e De. ... x..... So one unique property of the Chinese " DeP
construction" as well as English relative clauses is that there is absolutely only one lambda operator and correspondingly only one variable (x) bound by the lambda operator. They are in a bijective relationship. Otherwise, we get an ill - formed " DeP construction".
Finally the study concludes that the Traceability Principle can be expected to cover the formation and interpretation of all Chinese " DeP constructions" . According to this principle, we distinguish two situations. First, the variable bound by the lambda operator can be directly and naturally traced if the variable is situated in or . Second, the variable bound by the lambda operator situated in otherwise postions must be able to be indirectly traced out by the hint of the head NP after De, the resumptive pronoun, or by the hint of the predicate after De. Only when the variable can be traced and then a reasonable function can be formed can we make a well - formed " DeP construction" possible. By doing so, we naturally unify many formerly different and controversial de morphemes into one identical De morpheme. We claim in this study that the Traceability Principle is the most economical principle to deal with the Chinese " De construction".