A Syntactic Analysis of the “X de” Construction: A Study of Word Class Licensing Mechanisms from the Perspective of Cognitive Grammar

Abstract

The "X de" construction is a typical nominal de-construction in Modern Chinese. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives—by virtue of their respective conceptual natures as entities, processes, and properties—can provide a stable categorization base for the de-construction, thus forming legitimate referential expressions. In contrast, numerals, as pure quantity operators, and classifiers, as dependent bounding/landmark units, both lack independent conceptual autonomy and therefore cannot serve as X. This distributional difference reflects a deep selectional restriction imposed by the "X de" construction on the conceptual essence of word classes. It can be given a unified explanation in terms of the correspondence between syntactic well-formedness and conceptual autonomy.