Professor Zou Ke from California State University, East Bay was invited to deliver a lecture entitled “Lexicalization of NP in Contemporary Chinese” at the National Key Research Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics (CLAL) on the afternoon of September 9, 2015. The lecture was hosted by Professor XU Hai and attended by faculties and graduate students from the Center.    

Professor Zou overviewed lexicalization of a quadri-morphemic NP in contemporary Chinese, i.e., a quadri-morphemic NP, which consists of two deverbal morphemes and two nominal morphemes. The quadri-morphemic NP can be lexicalized into a V-V-N compound if one or both of the two nominal morphemes are head morpheme. Then, he explained this lexicalization process as deletion and head movement, following the studies by Hale & Keyser (1993) and Chomsky (1995). In particular, the deletion of one nominal morpheme makes the other nominal morpheme a bound morpheme which has to attach itself to the deverbal morpheme, in the same way that an affix is attached to the stem morpheme; and the head movement is both morphologically driven and legitimate under Chomsky’s (1995) Minimal Link Condition. Moreover, Professor Zou extended this morpho-syntactic analysis to the lexicalization from PP (P+N1)-V-N2 into V-N2-N1.

The lecture lasted about one and a half hour, and ended with Professor Zou discussing insightful questions from audience. Those discussions shed some lights on future research directions.