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Working on the computation of roots in Chinese compounds, this paper presents six major differences between the merger of roots in compound formation and the merger of elements in phrase structure formation: the existence of exocentric structures, the freedom of projectivity, the disappearance of subcategorization, the double licensing of formal features, the effect of Lexical Integrity in movement, and such an effect in pronominalization. All of these differences are accounted for by the hypothesis that roots do not have syntactic features. Moreover, this paper studies a case of merger level underspecification in languages that allow nouns and verbs to occur without any inflection: in the absence of a syntactic context, an isolated string of two elements can be ambiguous between the root-merger that eventually gives rise to a verb and the merger of a verb and its object that gives rise to a VP.

When a classifier occurs with a numeral and an event‐denoting expression, it is used as a unit to count events. The classifier is called a verbal classifier if the event‐denoting expression is verbal, although the classifier itself is not verbal. This paper argues that a numeral and a verbal classifier have a spec‐head relation, and the verbal expression is the complement. The proposal explains a number of syntactic generalizations of verbal classifiers in Mandarin Chinese. Like a frequentative adverb such as twice, a verbal classifier expression is either event‐internal or event‐external. The two types of classifiers have different possible positions in the language. The position contrasts are explained by different heights of the projection headed by a classifier. Theoretically, on the one hand, this research unifies the syntax of nominal and verbal numeral classifiers; and on the other hand, it explores the syntactic distinctions between event‐internal and event‐external verbal classifiers.

Coordination in syntax is an important part of the analysis of sentence structure. Niina Ning Zhang addresses the issues raised by coordinate pairings and the implications of these structures, looking in particular at examples within English and Chinese. The volume covers the major questions regarding coordinates in syntax, providing a fresh perspective to arguments raised within previous literature. She explains how such coordinate complexes are structured, how some coordinators can be combined in parts of speech, the fixed nature of some of these pairings and what changes exist between the coordinate and non-coordinate constructions. The theories raised are backed up by a rich variety of examples as well as providing a cross-linguistic perspective, contextualising these ideas within current syntactic research.