| In the spirit of Chomsky's Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework, we explore the derivation of typical bei passive construction in Mandarin Chinese. Contrary to the previous assumptions that bei can be a preposition, a verb or an inflectional passive morpheme like –en in English, we propose that bei should be treated as a functional category specific to Chinese language, with a strong passive feature which requires a noun to be its specifier. We propose that bei selects a transitive construction which has a verb as its head and that bei passive construction undergoes movement. As there are no presupposed structures in Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework, and the merge operation forms syntactic objects in an inherently binary fashion, we face the new problems of the order of Merge and the realization of the theta-grid. So two assumptions are put forward: 1) nominals have got their thematic roles in the lexical array; 2) derivations are regulated and controlled by the thematic role hierarchy. To satisfy the intuition of Mandarin –speaker, we assume there is abstract tense in Chinese. According to the characteristic of lacking morphological system in Chinese, we modify the definition of agreement feature. We also suggest that short passive and long passive should be derived in a uniform fashion, and the derivational distinctions between them originate from the structural properties of v. After providing a detailed analysis of short passive and long passive sentences in Mandarin Chinese, we focus special attention on passive sentences with retained object and resumptive pronoun. By adopting the revised thematic role hierarchy and the shortest steps condition, we provide a satisfactory explanation of the puzzling retained object. As to resumptive pronoun, we show that it has something to do with pragmatic element. We resort to cyclic application to Num as the means to realize the functional restoration.
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