Derivation Of Chinese Restrictive Relative Clauses In A Minimalist Account

The relative construction wins its place by possessing a most important property of human language—the recursiveness. Thus, many linguists have concentrated on the study of relative constructions. Noticeably, this issue has largely been dealt with in the framework of the Government and Binding (GB) Theory, within which two kinds of research views compete for its own legibility on the representation and derivation of relative clauses. One is called 'the Standard Theory' and the other 'the Promotion Theory'.According to this thesis' analysis, however, these mentioned two theories are confronted with some irresistible and unsolvable problems, the root of which has to be traced back to the GB framework on which these two theories base themselves. To be short, despite the issue of anaphor, the Standard Theory lacks a concrete syntactic mechanism to establish the proper relation between the head NP and the operator that is on the adjoined clause CP. As for the Promotion Theory, there is also no triggering mechanism for the derivational processes in this theory. This thesis makes some discussions on why these problems occur and suggests that it may be because of the framework of the GB Theory itself.To solve these problems, some linguists have turned to the Minimalist Program and proposed some interesting proposals, which offer some reasonable and efficient views on deriving the relative constructions in some languages. However, there is no one proposal that is totally compatible with the Chinese relative clauses, therefore, this thesis makes some adjustments with a verification of the specialties and functions of the determiner D and accommodate the Chinese relative clauses into the framework of the Minimalist Program.First of all, this thesis proposes that Chinese De should belong to the functional category C and it should be the C head of Chinese relative clauses. Besides, it Chinese De should possess an interpretable wh-feature and a strong uninterpretable EPP feature.Apart from the wh-feature and the EPP feature, there are two other essential sets of elements that are decisive in the derivation of a relative clause. The first set includes a bundle of features: the Case feature and the Φ -features (number, gender and person). The second set includes two determiners, the relative determiner D_rel and the external determiner D_ext, both of which can take the empty form in the derivation.Briefly speaking, the Minimalist proposal for the derivation of relative constructions in this thesis centers on the following five ideas: (a) there is an N-to-D incorporation or an FF(N)-to-D incorporation; (b) the relative determiner Drei and its complement NP may bear different Case features; (c) relative clauses respect the DP hypothesis; (d) bi-directional branching is allowed, and (e) Chinese De is analyzed as a C head instead of a D head.Utilizing such proposal, we can not only successfully solve those problems that exist either in the Standard Theory or in the Promotion Theory, but also make a further account for the several types of Island Effects in relative constructions under the Minimalist framework.This thesis also attempts to clarify the properties and functions of these two important elements: the relative determiner Drei and the external determiner Dext- It focuses on the significance of the null/empty D form and its relations with demonstratives and quantifiers. This discussion leads to a Generalized DP Projection Hypothesis, which exerts an important effect on the derivation of the definite and indefinite relative clauses.Last but not least, this thesis provides the derivational process of the adjunct relative clauses within the Minimalist framework. This thesis follows Ning's reanalysis of the Type I adjuncts treating them as the 'single-word adjunct relative operator', and demonstrates how to derive the legible Type I adjunct relative clauses in Chinese.