On The Syntax Of Chinese Small Clause

Since Williams (1974) put forward the term of small clause, lots of linguists have made extensive and profound studies on the structure of small clause. Although some achievements have already been made on this front, no agreement has been reached yet. In addition, most linguists are devoted themselves to studying English small clause, paying less attention to the investigation of Chinese small clause. Therefore, this thesis attempts to analyze the syntactic structure of Chinese small clause within the framework of Chomsky’s Transformational Generative Grammar. Further, it discusses its categorial status and distribution and mainly introduces the derivational process of Chinese small clause in different sentence structures and compares the similarities and differences between Chinese and English small clause tentatively.The thesis has firstly defined Chinese small clause as a constituent which contains a subject-predicate relationship semantically. Then, three standards of classifying Chinese small clause have been proposed in detail, namely properties of predicates of small clause, grammatical functions and semantic roles. Different scholars also have different views on the categorial status of small clause. This thesis analyzes Chinese small clause as a maximal projection whose head is an incomplete inflection on the basis of IP analysis which is proposed by Arts (1992) and Culicover (1997). The canonical form is [NP XP], and XP is located in the complement position of I. The subject of small clause originates in the specifier position of XP according to VP-internal Subject Hypothesis. And the predicate assigns the theta role to the subject in the light of Theta Theory. The subject of small clause moves up to the specifier position of incomplete IP to get the abstract case on the basis of Case Filter.The thesis has also discussed the syntactic properties of Chinese small clause:it has no complementizer but an incomplete inflection; the subject of small clause in different sentence structures comes in three distinct representations, namely noun phrase, empty subject PRO and trace; besides the word order of two nouns in nominal small clauses is fixed. Using IP analysis, the thesis has mainly analyzed the derivational process of Chinese small clause in ECM structure, SVOC structure, Raising structure, Existential structure and Double Object structure. Lastly, it has explored the similarities and differences between Chinese and English small clause tentatively. The derivational processes of Chinese and English small clause are different in Resultatives and There-be structures, but in other most cases, their derivational processes are much similar.