The Mandarin Passive Construction: Its Derivation Within The Principles & Parameters Approach

Mandarin passives are arguably classified into two categories: marked passives and unmarked passives. Marked passives all have their passive status signified by a lexical item. Such a lexical item is admittedly a grammaiicalized form that has undergone a decategorialization along a cline from a major category to a minor one. In Chinese the passive marker is not confined to bei. There are many bei-like forms that could be used to indicate a patient/undergoer subject and/or an agent/causer adjunct in a sentence. In spite of this, people still tend to use 'bei-construction' as a cover term for all marked passives. The passive status of unmarked passives has been a debatable matter. Some people just treat them as forming a subcategory of patient-subject sentence but deny they are passives; others extend the set of unmarked passives so as to include the patient-topic sentence as well. In this dissertation, we differentiate patient-subject sentence from patient-topic sentence, prove and establish the passive status of the patient-subject sentence despite its unmarkedness, and disprove the passive status of the patient-topic sentence despite its dislocatedness. Unmarked passives are thus taken into consideration in our modeling the derivation of the Chinese passives. This might be unprecedented, for our investigation reveals that the transformational-generative interest is exclusively centered on the bei-construction, with the unmarked passive largely alienated.Study on the Mandarin passive construction is time-honored. A great many analyses have been carried out adopting a structuralist approach. 李临定 (1980, 1986) extracted from a sea of data a handful of bei-structures, aiming at an adequate description of the Chinese marked passives. 李珊 (1994) and 范晓 (2000), among others, have the Chinese bei-construction decomposed into three segments: the pre-bei segment, the post-bei-pre-V segment, and the post-V segment, achieving a level of structural abstractness. Internal structures of these segments and possible lexical realizations of them are adequately described. All these analyses are remarkable for their descriptive adequacy. But they are no theory or theorizing of the Chinese passive construction because they are explanatorily inadequate.Inspired by Chomsky's Generative-Transformational Grammar, especially its laterversion following the Principles and Parameters approach, a host of overseas researchers dwelled their thought on the Chinese passive issue and endeavored to capture the Chinese fce/-construction in line with the GB theory and the GB theorizing of the English passivization. However, a look into their explorations into the issue seems to suggest that hopes for an integrate theory of the Chinese passive construction appear rather slim. The Chinese passive construction turns out to be far less docile than its English counterpart. Many issues related to it remain elusive or even enigmatic, most notably the retained object phenomenon, the categorial status and syntactic status of bei, the possessor raising phenomenon with relation to the Chinese passive construction, the resumptive pronoun phenomenon, the derivations of formal Z>e/-passives, pivotal iei-passives, and unmarked conceptual passives.These issues constitute the subtopics of our discussion here on the Chinese passive construction or our theorizing of the Chinese passivization. With these issues in mind, with conscious awareness of the weaknesses inherent in the studies already conducted, and without being blind to the research findings on passives by functionalists or cognitive linguists (to overcome the limitation of inflectional paucity in Chinese), I put forth a derivational pattern for the Chinese passives at large, which is susceptible to the UG principles but at the same time exhibits a sort of parametric variation that is licensed since the parameter concerned is connected with the passive inflection and thus potentially visible.Modeling of the Chinese passive derivation is based on a series of postulations, which includes a null transitive verb Va, a null passive morpheme, a functional category Bei, as well as a defective tense phrase T,jefP. All these postulations are made for good reasons and on firm bases.The derivational pattern set up in this dissertation for Chinese passives is also characterized by a flexibility found in it in its being used to wrestle with the formal passives, possessive passives and pivotal passives. For example, contention often arises over the question of which of the two verbs in a pivotal passive should be morphologically regarded as in the passive form. In our model we circumvent this problem by saying that neither of the verbs is passivized. The verb that is passivized is a third one, presumably the abstract form of 'affect'. With respect to formal passives, we initiate a formalized focus feature (Wfa 2001) into their derivation to account for the apparent contrast between a Case-marking null position...