The Syntax Phonology Interface of Mood Particles in Mandarin Chinese

The present thesis focuses on the syntactic study of the position of mood particles in Mandarin Chinese. The most popular mood particles in Mandarin Chinese are six: “ne”, “a”, “ma”, “ba”, “le” and “de”, used at the end of the sentences, traditionally believed to denote interrogative, declarative, imperative, and exclamative moods. This thesis argues that the mood particles don’t carry any lexical meanings themselves, and as sentence affixes, they are adjoined to the head complementizer at the end of the sentence in head final language of Chinese at the sensorimotor interface after the spellout in PF level. Therefore, mood particles are not computed in the internal grammar but in the externalization process of the computation.