Hornstein's Minimalist Approach To Control And Chinese Control Constructions

Recently control has become a hot topic in generative grammar. Given the awkward position of the government-and-binding (GB) approach to control, different approaches to control are proposed within Minimalist Program (MP), such as Martin's case-theoretic account of the distribution of PRO, Manzini & Roussou's minimalist theory of A-movement and control, Hornstein's minimalist approach to control. Those recent advances in control under the MP assumptions have mainly focused on European languages, particularly on English, but seldom on Chinese. Thus, this thesis will provide an extensive overview of the major recent issues concerning control and give a critical survey of Hornstein's minimalist approach from Chinese perspective. The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the universal validity of Hornstein's proposal as his approach applies to Chinese. Chinese offers significant evidence for the universal validity of Hornstein's proposal because Chinese displays peculiar properties distinguishing it from the languages of the Indo-European family. The investigation is confined to the core control constructions in Chinese, viz two types of serial verb constructions in Li and Thompson's Functional Reference Grammar, which has been widely discussed in the last two decades's control study of Chinese.It has been generally accepted that control phenomena subsume two forms of control, i.e., obligatory control (OC) and non-obligatory control (NOC). Within Minimalist Program, Hornstein proposes movement to account for OC and 'pro' to handle NOC. After applying Hornstein's approach to Chinese, we find that his approach can explicitly account for Chinese control structures without taking account of the distinction between finite and nonfinite梩he big obstacle to the study of Chinese control. In addition, Hornstein's approach to control has greatly improved our understanding of this phenomenon, for instance, control-PRO relation and PRO-infinitival relation. On the other hand, some inadequacies of Hornstein's approach are also pointed out when the approach applies to Chinese. Certainly, we can by no means claim that the present analysis in this thesis can successfully account for all Chinese control constructions. In fact, up till now no approach can entirely account for the complexity of control constructions even in English. Nevertheless, it is worth indicating that the presentanalysis in this thesis is indeed a new attempt for Chinese control constructions.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one provides a brief overview and explains why we choose this research topic. Chapter two reviews the background for recent treatments of control in MP and introduces Homstein's approach in detail. In addition, we address why we select Homstein's approach rather than others. Chapter three proves that two kinds of serial verb constructions display the essential properties of control constructions and discusses the outstanding problem with Chinese control phenomenon. Chapter four shows how Homstein's approach works to account for Chinese control constructions and compares it with Huang's (1989) Generalized Control Theory and Xu's Lexical-Thematic Theory of Control. Subsequently, we discuss what merits Homstein's proposal has and what challenges it has to face in regard to Chinese linguistic reality. Finally, we summarize our results in Chapter five.