A Syntactic Study On BEI And BA Constructions In UG Framework

The language philosophy and research method of Chomsky's Universal Grammar are quite different from traditional linguistics. It is a new tool for the researcher to study language from a very different angle and a lot of language phenomena that have never been paid attention to were found out. In this thesis the author first summarizes and comments on the study of BA and BEI construction in the framework of Universal Grammar. Although in this field we have achieved a lot, there are still problems that remain unanswered. Then the author proposes her way of analyzing the two constructions. Now the study of language is at a new horizon, which is at the stage of the minimalist program. Possibly we could gain more insight in the new light and eventually prove that theoretically there are no significant grammatical constructions except taxonomic artifacts. Since Chinese is one of the important members in the world language family and it is quite different from the western languages, it will be very meaningful for us to apply those theories to our native language Chinese or use it to test the validity of the universal theory.