A Generative Account Of English And Chinese Subjects

Based on the framework of theoretical system of Generative Grammar, the thesis makes a comparison between English and Chinese subjects to conclude the common factors X and analyzes how these factors are embodied and operated in composing a grammatical sentence.As for English subjects,’logical subjects’and’syntactic subjects’will be referred to:A syntactic subject is generally considered to be at the specifier position of IP; and a logic subject is defined as the external argument of V-bar.Traditional work in syntactic maintains that the subjects serving as external arguments and the expletive subjects generate in spec-IP but the subjects serving as internal arguments typically raise to spec-IP from VP internal. Here it should be noted that this conclusion bases on the assumption that the internal argument is positioned inside VP whereas the external argument is positioned outside VP. But since the assumption of VP-internal subject hypothesis (Koopman and Sportiche:1991) has been proposed, the argument structure has been integrated under the same VP and all subjects are thought to be derived. The research on Chinese subjects has always been a controversial topic for the reason that Chinese is a language without morphological markers. This paper proposes that Chinese subjects also originate in VP and it adopts the judge criterion put forward by Hu (胡建华:1997) to distinguish Chinese finite clauses from non-finite clauses. After that it goes on examining the problems of case-assignment and argument structure to get the conclusion that the external argument of the predicate in finite clauses is the logic subject, which needs to raise to the specifier position of IP to satisfy case theory and EPP. As to the problem of subject identification in the structures with more than one NP appearing at the head position, only the subject NP originates in VP and serves as the external argument of the predicate and the reason that the other NPs appear at the beginning of the sentence is topicalization.Later on, it brings forward that the covert subjects of Chinese infinitival clauses are equal to PROs in English, which are not governed but are controlled either by the subjects or objects of their main clauses; and PRO can also distributes in the complement or adjunct position of a nonfinite clause.With regard to Chinese sentences without a subject, they can’t be treated as pro:because there isn’t a system of agreement inflection in Chinese, it can’t be recovered which ends up with the result that it isn’t licensed according to Han (韩景泉.:1997); What’s more, in the light of intrasentential referential identity brought forward by Chomsky, it doesn’t have an antecedent. Therefore, Chinese isn’t a pro-drop language.On the basis of the comparative study on English and Chinese subjects, we conclude the common factors between them are that they both generate in VPs and serve as the external arguments. But due to the overt case feature of the English subject, it must raise to spec-IP to be checked and every sentence must have a subject; whereas the generation of the Chinese subject is complicated, other NPs in the sentence can turn up at the head position through topicalization and the Chinese subjects can be omitted in context.The feasibility of applying Universal Grammar to studying Chinese subjects proves the universality of language; Furthermore, the research on Chinese subjects relates to the classification of sentence structures and the distinction between subjects and topics. In addition, this paper tries to explain why the topic NP raises to the specifier position of CP as the subject NP raises to the specifier position of IP, which illustrates that the generative analysis can reveal the substantive features of language.