Verb Copying In Mandarin Chinese

This thesis concentrates itself on the verb copying construction in Mandarin. It refers to the construction in which the verb repeats itself when in the presence of both a complement and an object. The verbs play different roles, though realized in the same phonetic form in this clause.More and more linguists delve into this topic, accounting for the derivation of the verb copying construction from different perspectives. They adopt various methods, including syntactic analysis, semantic analysis and pragmatic analysis. We focus on the research done by Li & Thompson (1981, 1997), Huang (1982), Li (1990), Huang (1996) and Yang (1998, 2000).Following Chomsky (1998, 1999), we develop light verb hypothesis in the research. It is assumed that the EPP-feature of the light verb initiates the verb copying construction in Mandarin. Mandarin light verb has a strong feature. It is realized with phonetic content and semantic contribution in most occasions at the interface levels. This strong feature initiates the EPP feature of the light verb. That is to say, the light verb can have an extra spec in addition to its external argument. The unit verb plus object can be a deverbalized phrase to express "doing something". It is the EPP feature and the deverbalized phrase that motivate the appearance of the verb copying construction. In contrast, the feature of English light verb is weak while the feature of English verb is strong. English light verb imposes itself on the verb. So it cannot trigger its EPP feature to get an extra spec. The concept tense is realized morphologically on the verb. English verb employs morphological realization to denote the sense of "doing something". Thus my proposal can better account for the difference between the existence and non-existence of the verb copying construction in Chinese and English with respect to the EPP feature of the light verb.Other related issues are also involved in this thesis, including the feature of the verbs that cannot form the verb copying construction and the case when the complement is a temporal word.