A Phase-based Study Of Chinese Possessor-subject Possessee-object Sentences

Possessor-subject possessee-object (PSPO) sentences have been the center of discussion for a long time. It has drawn a lot of attention from many scholars during the1950s. However, due to the limitation of the environment then and the limitation of traditional grammar, researches concerning this problem were not thorough at all, and many problems remained to be solved. During the1990s, this special sentence structure became the focus of attention again. Up to now, there are basically two accounts of this problem, one is Movement Hypothesis (Xu,1999; Han,2000; Wen&Chen,2001), which believes that the possessor is moved to the front of the sentence from the attributive position of the possessee; the other is Base Generation Hypothesis (Zhu,2005, Pan&Han,2005), which maintains that the possessor is directly generated at the front of the sentence instead of moving there.There are still a lot of disagreements about PSPO sentences, for example:why does the genitive case marker "de" disappear? Is it deleted during the raising of possessor, or it just becomes "covert"? What kind of case does the possesee take? Is it partitive case, nominative case, or accusative case? Is the possessor subject or topic in the sentence? Concerning these problems, scholars have argued and debated for a long time, but still no agreement is reached. Therefore, this thesis tries to study Chinese PSPO sentences from the perspective of Phase Theory, which is proposed by Chomsky in recent years. Phase Theory explains and develops MI (Minimalist Inquiries) further. Chomsky proposes Phase Theory in order to strengthen the biological property of language study. In Phase Theory, syntactic operations are proceded phase by phase. When one phase is finished, it will be submitted, thus will not participate in the syntactic operation in the next phase. This is Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC).Chapter One of this thesis will be an introduction to the theoretical framework of this thesis, which includes Theta Theory, Case Theory, Phase Theory and Split-CP Hypothesis, and Phase Theory is the center of this chapter. The introduction of Phase Theory includes its definition, the Probe-Goal Relation, Phase Impenetrability Condition and so on. Chapter Two will be an introduction to PSPO sentences, including its definition, grammatical features, and its distinctive features, and there will be a literature review of this special sentence structure. Chapter Three is the analysis of the syntactic derivation of PSPO sentences. Firstly, we make a comprehensive analysis of current research methods, and point out the potential limitations. Then, an alternative account based on phase theory is proposed for the PSPO sentences. We argue that the possessor is base-generated at the specifier position of Topic. Since verbs in Chinese PSPO sentences are unaccusative, the VP they form cannot form a phase, therefore, the possessee can be assigned a nominative case through long distance Agree with T. Finally, this thesis lists the advantages of this research method. However, this thesis also has its own limitations:it only considers PSPO sentences in Chinese, without doing further cross-linguistic studies; therefore, this is one question left to further research.