A Minimalist Study Of Passive Construction In Mandarin Chinese

This paper, in a Minimalist way, provides a tentative analysis for the syntactic status of BEI in Mandarin passives construction, and discusses the implications for the diversities between long and short passive constructions in Mandarin Chinese.Passive construction is one of the widely discussed topics in syntactic research. Huang [1] proposes that there is now a relatively uncontroversial view of how the passive sentences should be analyzed in English; uncontroversial at least among researchers working within the same theoretical framework. However, the passive construction in Mandarin Chinese has remained as a topic of great controversy. Although the research of English passives may somehow shed some lights on the studies of passives in Mandarin, this paper simply focuses on Mandarin passives. There are many expressions for passive in Modern Mandarin Chinese, but this study will concentrate on one of those means, that is, BEI-construction.Two main classical approaches on the passive sentences will be observed here, namely, the prepositional approach and the verbal approach. The former argues that BEI in long Mandarin passives is a preposition and a particle or clitic in short ones, while the latter proposes that BEI is a verbal element and the diversities between long and short passives in Mandarin are attributed to the different complements selected by BEI: in long passives, BEI selects a clause while in short ones, VP will be the target selected by BEI. It will be shown that neither the prepositional approach nor the verbal approach provided a satisfactory account for the properties of passives in Mandarin. I argue that most of the previous research work under the framework of Government and Binding theory (GB), and I apply a new approach to this topic here.This thesis introduces the framework of Minimalist Program (MP), firstly put forward by Chomsky in the early 1990s, and its new development, for instance, Minimalist Inquiries (MI) and Derivation by Phase (DbP). Under the basic principles of MP and its new development, some studies of passive sentences in Mandarin will also be found, although there are some nontrivial problems in these studies. This paper also presents a diachronic analysis of passive construction in Ancient Chinese and Modern Chinese, with a goal of developing a general account...