This paper investigates three constructions in Mandarin, all of which convey a purposive/teleological meaning, including the lai purposive, the hao purposive, and the bare purposive. Despite the fact that each type of purposive clause in Mandarin occurs at the right edge of a sentence, it is argued that none of the purposive clause is a genuine right adjunct in the underlying syntactic structure. On the other hand, our analysis shows that the lai purposive employs complementation of a secondary predicate, the hao purposive involves conjunction of two clauses, and the bare purposive should be analyzed as left adjunction that is stranded in the right edge after verb movement. The evidence for our analysis is drawn from subject and object gaps, the ba-construction in Mandarin, agentivity, and linear ordering of multiple purposive clauses. This work thus demonstrates representative cases where a structure that appears to involve right adjunction may in fact employ no right adjunction at all. The conclusion is thus consistent with the prediction of Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA).

This paper examines multiple-classifier constructions in Chinese, in which two classifiers are stacked in one nominal position. The following three properties are found in these constructions: (i) strict linear ordering between different types of classifiers, (ii) definiteness/specificity of the lower DP, and (iii) obligatory non-distributive readings. The properties of multiple-classifier constructions allow us to study the syntax and semantics of nominal expressions in Chinese from a novel point of view. We argue that, syntactically, and against the bare NP analysis in of partitive construction with an empty partitive head. The hypothesis of an empty partitive head not only accounts for the properties of the multiple-classifier constructions, but it also offers explanations for the asymmetry of partitive readings in Chinese relative clauses.

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The paper discusses the universality of the final-over-final condition (FOFC). It has been proposed that sentence-final particles (SFPs) in Chinese may invalidate the universality of FOFC. This paper argues that the challenge from SFPs is inconclusive since the evidence for the head status of SFPs is lacking. On the other hand, the leftward complement of N 0 in Chinese (Huang 2016) poses a greater threat to FOFC. However, it is argued that the violation is caused by a languageparticular word order constraint due to Case directionality (Li 1990). Relating the syntactic FOFC violation to the word order constraint in compounds, it is proposed that FOFC may be understood as an instance of the shape conservation principle (Williams 2003), where the language-particular constraint is satisfied at the expense of a minimal violation of the universal condition.

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