The Syntactic Study Of The De-constructions In Chinese

With the development of the recent works in Minimalism, a new approach is highly demanded for the explanation for the typical phenomena in specific languages. In modern Chinese, de-construction is a regularly used pattern in our daily life, which is also a classical research topic in the generative field. There are a number of arguments on the syntactic features of the de-constructions. The different hypotheses which have been proposed at every stage of the development of generative grammar deepen our understanding about the de-constructions. None of the previous studies, however, has given a comprehensive explanation for the de-constructions. Therefore, this thesis conducts a further analysis of the syntactic study of the de-constructions in Chinese.There is a long debate on the syntactic status of de in Chinese. From the perspective of the framework of Chomsky's Minimalist Program (MP) (1995), this thesis agrees with Simpson's (1997) proposal that de in Chinese is actually a determiner in D0 position, but has undergone near full bleaching of its definiteness specification upon DP-hypothesis.This thesis focuses on the analysis of the syntactic features of de and its categorical status in de-construction. The thesis will emphasize the analysis of the shi...de constructions, which are the typical Chinese de-constructions. In order to account for the alternation in which the object appears after de, Simpson & Wu propose that since the past time implication is strongly associated with the use of de in [V-de-Ob] form, de should be reanalyzed from D0 toT0. However, I argue that the mechanism proposed by Simpson & Wu can only explain some of the de-constructions with the past time interpretation. The omission of de is very interesting in the de-constructions. In this thesis, I will attempt to give a deeper analysis of the visibility and invisibility of the element de. If the functional element de is regarded as the determiner in Chinese, how can we generate sentences without the determiner? Therefore, this thesis tries to find the answers from the phase theory.Radford (2000a) argued that the light noun heading nP is always strong in English, so that nouns always raise from the head N position in NP to the head n position of nP. Based on the above assumption, this thesis further predicts that it is the same in Chinese nominal phrases. If V is always being raised to v in verbal phrases, there may be a greater generalization to the nominal phrases. This thesis hypothesizes that the complement of D is nP. With the nP as the complement of D, it can provide us some extra positions in the derivational process. The EPP feature of D forces movement of some elements from SpecnP to SpecDP. We also make some efforts on identifying the evidence for the phasehood of DPs.In summary, this thesis tries to study the de-constructions under the latest minimalist framework, especially the phase theory, for the purpose of giving a uniform account of the functional head de and the derivations of various de-constructions. However, many questions are left untouched and the discussions are far from thoroughness. Much work will be done on this subject.