Definiteness Agreement and the Chinese DP

This paper reflects on how and why agreement systems may arise, maintain themselves and ultimately go into decay, and suggests that Mandarin Chinese relative clause/possessive de is a ‘bleached’ determiner instantiating one possible endpoint/outcome in the historical development of a system of definiteness agreement. Comparing Chinese with Hebrew, Buginese and other languages which show earlier stages of definiteness concord, it is suggested that Chinese shows an interesting deviation from more common patterns of determiner grammaticalization with the re-deployment rather than simple loss of the determiner de after its earlier hypothetical definiteness has disappeared. Synchronically the paper also attempts to show how an analysis of de as an enclitic determiner in D0 is able to explain a variety of current syntactic patterns in the language.