A Syntactic Account Of The Coexistence Of SVO And SOV Word Order In Chinese

The major focus of the study in this thesis is to propose a syntactic accountof the coexistence of SVO and SOV order in modem Chinese in terms of P&P(principles-and -parameters)approach under the basic assumption that there existsa universal word order and any variation of orders counld be derived form the basicone.I propose that it is the properties of syntatctic categories rather than propertiesof language-specific parameters that determine word order variation.from amorphology-driven perspective,I put forth the "Heavy Verb Hypothesis" as an account of the coexistence of SVO and SOV order in Chinese. Based on Kayne's(1994)analysis,I point out that a language-specific headparameter does not exist.The so-called"head-position"parameter cannot explainthe coexistence of variations of word order in a certain language.Some data ofJapanese verba ave analyzed and the concept of heavy verb is defined.I fourtherpropose that heavy verbs have some features that need checking and thus have to remain in situ. Based on Kayne's(1994)LCA and Chomsky's(1995a)improvement of LCA,the heavy verb phrase marker could be interpreted into and SOV linear order.Thisgives a straightforward account of the SOV order in Chinese.And the coexistenceof both heavy verbs and non-heavy verbs accounts for the coexistence of bothSVO and SOV ordern in Chinese.The Heavy Verb Hypothesis is also applied to analyze some other languagefacts in the last part of the thesis.