The Classification of Mandarin Idiomatic VP

摘要

Due to their uncommon meaning-form pairing, idioms have always been a center piece in discussions about how human mind stores and computes meaning. Based on the composition of their aspectual properties, this thesis classifies Mandarin idiomatic VPs into five different categories to show that certain idioms can be argued to have aspect put together in the syntax while others are best described to have their aspectual properties stored as a whole in the lexicon. This complex result adds partial support to both Representational Modularity and Distributed Morphology, meanwhile providing more cross-linguistic evidence to the discussion on idiomatic meaning-form pairing.