The He-Structure in the Subject Position Revisited

摘要

The syntactic status of he 和 in Chinese [DP_1 he DP_2] structure is ambiguous when occurring in the subject position. It could be a preposition or a conjunctor. Three views have been proposed to account for this ambivalence, namely, the context-deterministic account, the multi-categorizer account, and the preposition-taking-all account. This paper argues against the preposition-taking-all account from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, and proposes that he in the subject position can be and should be coordinative. On the basis of this, this paper presents several advantages of reinstalling the preposition-conjunction dichotomy analysis of he.