This thesis capitalized on the properties of –DE (得) with an overt complement and a covert complement in Mandarin Chinese. Unlike its near counterpart -KAH (甲) in Taiwan Southern Min, which can occur in the form with either the following complement is phonetically realized or unrealized, -DE in Mandarin Chinese has the nature of obligatorily realizing its complement in the descriptive and resultative structures. However, T.-C., Tang (1990) notices that -DE is compatible with a covert complement, if and only if the -DE construction is with qiao (瞧)‘look’ or kan (看)‘look’ in the sentence initial position. Therefore, we propose that the presence of qiao / kan look’ would play a role as an illocutionary force and serve as an exclamative licenser. Through the co-occurrence restriction between the sentence initial element and the covert complement following –DE, the sentence involving the covert complement is properly licensed and denoting an extreme degree sense as exclamatives. In addition, we juxtapose the parallel –DE construction in Mandarin Chinese, as well as the –KAH construction in Taiwan Southern Min, suggesting that the semantic similarities and the syntactic differences hinge upon the language-parametric of the exclamative licenser, namely, the –DE construction needs an overt licenser to license the covert complement while the –KAH construction is capable of having a covert licenser instead. In general, we find two main points of view with respect to syntactic and semantic perspectives respectively: First, unlike the analysis which is due to the different degrees of lexicalization between –DE in Mandarin Chinese and –KAH in Taiwan Southern Min, we propose a unified analysis for the structure of Mandarin Chinese –DE and Taiwanese –KAH with overt and covert complements. Second, we suggest that the obligatory extreme degree sense within the –DE construction and the –KAH construction when the complement is not phonetically realized has been explained away through the overt licenser qiao / kan ‘look’ in Mandarin Chinese and the covert licenser in Taiwan Southern Min. Furthermore, the related wh-phrases zenme (怎麼) ‘how come / how’ in Mandarin Chinese is also concerned in this study. Since wh-exclamatives and wh-interrogatives are widely proven to have a close relationship between languages, we try to investigate how and why both interrogatives and exclamatives would be licensed by a morphological identical form zenme how come / how’ in the –DE construction in Mandarin Chinese.

此篇論文主要在探討國語的得 (-DE) 字結構作為感嘆句時的認可條件 (licensing condition)。國語得字結構有別於閩南語的對應詞 (counterpart) –KAH在於閩南語的-KAH當結果句 (Resultatives) 或描述句 (Descriptives) 時可以選擇帶有一個顯性補語 (overt complement) 或是一個隱性補語 (covert complement)，然而，在國語的得字結構當作結果句或描述句時，得字後不能帶有一個隱性補語 (covert complement)但是，當得字結構的句首出現一個具有語力 (illocutionary force) 的認可語 (licenser)來認可 (license) 得字後帶有的隱性補語，句子就能合乎語法，而成為傳達說話者主觀性 (subjectivity) 的感嘆句。首先，我們根據湯廷池 (1990) 所提出的瞧 / 看放置於句首而形成的特殊得字結構作為發端，進而藉由此脈絡討論和比較Zanuttini & Portner (2003) 為英語感嘆句和Lien & Liu (2006) 為閩南語感嘆句所設立的一套判斷準則是否能夠用在國語的得字結構感嘆句的判定。事實上，Zanuttini & Portner (2000) 時就為英語感嘆句建立了三項清楚而明確的「標準」(criteria)，即「事實」(factivity)、「等級涵蘊」(scalar implicature) 和不需要聽者的回答 (inability to function in question/answer pairs)。然而，Lien & Liu (2006) 也為閩南語感嘆句提出必須具備的三個條件: (1) 說話者為第一人稱 (2) 語意的強烈程度和 (3) 不能和模態詞 (modal) 「可能」或「應該」這類連用。再者，我們以英語中的wh-疑問詞 How作為對比，探討國語對應詞 怎麼’ ’how’ 在得字句中是否也能同時成為疑問句認可語 (wh-interrogative licenser) 和感嘆句認可語 (wh-exclamative licenser)。並且針對怎麼 ‘how’ 所形成的疑問句和感嘆句，利用左緣結構 (left periphery) 來解釋怎麼 ‘how’在得字結構中所出現的歧義性 (ambiguity)，是來自於出現在不同的句法位置中而得到ㄕP的語義詮釋。

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