Deriving the Superficial Order of Mandarin Chinese Sentential Final Particles: A Feature-Equilibrium Perspective

Abstract

The main goal of this work is to offer an analysis concerning the distribution of Sentential final particles (SFP) in Mandarin Chinese in terms of the Symmetric Syntax formulated by Narita and Fukui (2022). We propose two alternatives of deriving the linear order of SFP that can satisfy the requirement of constructing Feature-Equilibrium (F-Equi), which is argued to play a significant role in narrow syntax computation by Narita and Fukui: (i) to construct {proposition}-equilibrium; (ii) to construct {k, R}-equilibrium.