A Syntactic Analysis Of The Chinese Bei-construction

This thesis is a probe into the syntax of the Chinese bei-construction which is one of the most heated topics for discussion in the field of syntax. Compared with the English passive structure, the Chinese bei-construction exhibits some unique behaviors such as "resumptive pronoun" and "retained object". Undoubtedly, it is of great theoretical significance to study this construction.In the past few decades, quite a number of linguists like Feng(1997), Wu(1999), Xu(1999),and Han(2000), etc. studied the Chinese bei-construction from different perspectives. Challenging and influencing as they are, some problems remain unsolved. Most importantly, they failed to provide a unified explanation to the different syntactic patterns of this construction. Therefore, it is desirable that a uniform account of the Chinese bei-construction be achieved with some modifications and improvements of the previous studies.Within the framework of the Minimalist Program ( Chomsky, 1993&1995 ), an attempt is made to the syntax of the Chinese bei-construction in this thesis which covers the following three questions: ( i ) What is the syntactic status of bei? (ii) How is the Chinesebei-construction derived? (iii) How to satisfy the Case Theory during the derivation?Given the serious drawbacks inevitably caused by the bei-preposition analysis and the bei-verb analysis, we argue in this thesis that bei should be treated consistently as a sub-verb (a kind of light verb v) in different syntactic patterns of the Chinese bei-construction. With respect to the syntactic structure of the Chinese bei-construction, we hold the proposal that it is a proliferated VP-construction in which there exists an abstractagentive verb ( v* ) between bei (v) and the core verb (V) and that the primary subject NP1, the focal subject NP2 and the secondary subject NP3, following the essence of "vp-internal Subject Hypothesis", are base-generated at spec-vP, spec-v*P and spec-VP respectively if they are phonetically realized. Such an argument is derived on the basis of Bowers'(1993) Syntax of Predication and Fujita's (1993) Causative Construction which interact and make our analysis to the structure of the Chinese bei-construction tenable.With regard to the Case problem of the NPs in the Chinese bei-construction, we propose that, in light of the spirit of "Split INFL Hypothesis" and "Split VP Hypothesis", such functional feature-checking categories as AgrS, Focus, and AgrO, together with their projections, are generated at different syntactic levels in the Chinese bei-construction. Then the secondary subject NP3, the focal subject NP2 and the primary subject NP1 moves to spec-AgrOP, spec-FocusP and spec-AgrSP respectively to have their case-and agreement-features checked under a spec-head relation between a functional head and its specifier.For some semantic requirements, the primary subject NP1 must be identical or related to the secondary subject NP3, the latter will get deleted when they are identical. And in certain circumstances, the focal subject NP2 is not overtly realized for various reasons. In both cases, the corresponding functional head and its projection will disappear in light of the Economy Principle. Hence different patterns of the Chinese bei-construction are unitarily derived by a mechanism presented in this thesis.