On the Distinction between Compound Nouns and NPs in Mandarin and the Comparison between Mandarin and English Nominal Expressions

Zhu (1985) claims that Mandarin nouns and adjectives can be nominal modifiers where- as verbs cannot, which is based on the assumption that Mandarin nouns and adjectives form an NP with a head noun while verbs form a compound noun with a head noun. I argue that the assumption does not hold. The paper points out that a sequence consisting of a modifier and a head noun in Mandarin is a compound noun regardless of the category of the modifier, whereas a sequence consisting of a modifier, the functional word "de" and a head noun is a noun phrase. Compared with English, Mandarin is uniformly head-final in both compound nouns and NPs. At the same time, all modifiers in NPs are marked with "de" in Mandarin. The superficial differences in the internal structure of NP between Mandarin and English can be attributed to the basic building blocks of the two languages, namely that Mandarin is a monosyllabic root language and has the functional element "de".