One of the main features of the correlative construction is the necessity of an appropriate correlate (either a demonstrative or a pronoun) in the main clause. While the syntactic features of the correlative construction are well established, the relationship between the correlative clause and its correlate remains unclear. In this dissertation, I propose that the correlative clause is the overt pronunciation of the index of the demonstrative. The correlative, therefore, does not adjoin to IP (Dayal 1996) or the demonstrative (Bhatt 2003) but enters the syntax as the indexical argument of the demonstrative phrase (Nunberg 1993; Elbourne 2008). I then turn to the adverbial correlative clause, which involves an adverbial relative phrase, and show that it is also the overt pronunciation of the index and, further, that it is interpreted as a definite description and contributes an individual of type e. Having established the relationship between the correlative clause and its correlate, I develop a new analysis of the semantic contribution of both the single headed correlative, involving one relative phrase, and the multi-headed correlative which involves multiple relative phrases. I propose that the correlative gets its interpretation through a Q particle, QCOR, which raises from the relative phrase to Spec-CP. It is QCOR which allows both adverbial and nominal correlatives to have a definite interpretation. I present new data from Hindi and Marwari which shows that the multi-headed correlative is basegenerated inside of the main clause, at the highest demonstrative or below, and denotes an ordered pair. Each member of that set is then an argument of one of the demonstratives in the main clause. Finally, if the proposed analysis is correct, then it should be follow that other types of phrases can occur in the same position. Not only is this possible in Hindi and Marwari, but sign languages and Mandarin Chinese allow overt indices as well.

Dans ce travail, nous examinons les propriétés syntaxiques et sémantiques des coordonnants de prédicats du mandarin contemporain ainsi que les structures syntaxiques des coordinations qu’ils forment. Nous nous intéressons aux coordinations simples et corrélatives. D’une part, nous découvrons que comme Zhang Ning (2010) l’a avancé les coordinations simples du mandarin ont une structure de type spécifieur-tête-complément : le coordonnant est la tête de la coordination, le conjoint externe le spécifieur et le conjoint interne le complément. Mais d’autre part, nous démontrons que, contrairement à l’affirmation de Zhang Ning (2008), la composition de la structure syntaxique des coordinations corrélatives du mandarin est différente de celles des langues germaniques : les premières sont composées d’une conjonction nulle et de plusieurs particules de focus tandis que les secondes, comme le montrent des travaux antérieurs, sont constituées d’une conjonction prononcée et d’une particule de focus. Au long de notre étude, nous comparons par ailleurs les coordonnants de prédicats du mandarin sur les plans syntaxique et sémantique. Nous remarquons qu’ils diffèrent l’un de l’autre selon au moins l’un des aspects suivants : les catégories syntaxiques des éléments qu’ils peuvent coordonner, les relations sémantiques qu’ils peuvent établir entre leurs conjoints et la possession d’un trait [V] ou d’un trait [-V]. Enfin, nous notons que les prédicats reliés par certains coordonnants doivent, dans la plupart des cas, avoir les mêmes traits aspectuels. Nous expliquons que cette tendance est liée au type de relation sémantique que ces coordonnants établissent entre les prédicats qu’ils relient. / In this dissertation, we study the syntactic and semantic features of several coordinators of predicates in contemporary Mandarin and analyze the syntactic structures of the coordinate constructions formed by these coordinators. We investigate not only simple but also correlative coordinations. We notice that, on the one hand, the Mandarin simple coordination has most likely a head-specifier-complement structure, as Zhang Ning (2010) has proposed: the coordinator is the head, the external conjunct is the specifier and the internal conjunct is the complement. On the other hand, in contrast to Zhang Ning’s (2008) claim, we discover that the correlative coordinations of Mandarin and those of Germanic languages do not have the same syntactic configurations: the former are composed of one silent conjunction and at least two focus-sensitive particles while the latter, as previous research has noted, are made up of one overt conjunction and one focus-sensitive particle. In addition, we find out that the Mandarin coordinators of predicates differ from one another in at least one of the following respects: the syntactic categories of the elements that they can coordinate, the semantic relationships that they may build between their conjuncts and the possession of a [V] feature or a [-V] feature. Last but not least, we notice that the predicates coordinated by some coordinators must, in most of the cases, have identical aspectual features. We argue that this tendency is related to the type of semantic relationship that these coordinators build between their conjuncts.