Ellipsis Involving 'de' in Mandarin Chinese

Various works have been done on the property of 'de' in Mandarin Chinese and how it functions in ellipsis, such as the property vs. quantity reading contrast proposed by Li (2013) in her paper P-Insertion and Ellipsis. While ‘de’ is generally considered as a head that has a noun phrase as its complement and can license the noun phrase to be elided in ellipsis, the relationship between different functional phrases that involve ‘de’ still needs to be understood more clearly. This paper intends to investigate the relationship between adjectival/clausal phrases and possessive phrases in the same sentence when undergoing ellipsis by using examples that contain several adjectival/clausal phrases and possessive phrases. Interestingly, the flexibility of word order that allows any of the modifying phrases to undergo ellipsis in examples that only contain adjectival/clausal phrases disappears when a possessive phrase is introduced. The adjectival/clausal phrase that precedes the possessor DP is fixed and can no longer be elided. This provides an insight into how possessive phrases differ from adjectival/clausal phrases, and the interaction between them. Further investigation into ellipsis involving embedded possessive phrases is also required to understand ‘de’ more extensively.