A Study Of Affected Passive Constructions

In this thesis, the Affected Passive Construction, which has been referred to variously as the retained object construction, indirect passive construction or possessive passive construction in previous studies, refers to the kind of passive constructions with affectedness. Semantically, the referent of the subject NP usually undergoes something unfortunate passively; structurally, an object is retained after the predicate verb and it is the very retained object that has direct semantic relation to the predicate verb, not the subject (in general passive construction, the superficial subject is the object of the predicate); by and large, the postverbal NP may hold a part-and-whole, kinship or possession relation with the passive subject NP.This thesis attempts to study the syntactic status of bei in Mandarin Chinese and the derivation process of passive construction with affectedness in Mandarin Chinese as well as in Japanese and English within the framework of Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework (Chomsky 1998) and Derivation by Phase (Chomsky 1999), aiming at seeking a unified derivational mechanism for this elusive or even enigmatic passive construction.In the previous studies of the retained object constructions, one of the most important accounts is the Possessor Raising Analysis. It can be shown that this analysis faces serious problems. In an alternative account, we propose that bei belongs to one of the three core functional categories T and carries [+affected] feature, which is marked as "T_aff". We further propose a split T hypothesis: The core functional category T is split into event structure T_aff and tense T_ten. Passive marker bei in Chinese, passive morpheme -(r)are in Japanese and get in English all belong to T_aff, which is universal in languages. T_aff has agreement features and EPP feature.According to Chomsky's basic structural properties of CFCs, the structural properties of T_aff can be illustrated in the following configuration, where T_aff is the CFC, XP is the extra Spec selected by its EPP feature, and EA is the external argument selected by T_aff.α= [XP[(EA)T_affYP]]It is believed that there are passive constructions with "affectedness" in Chinese and other languages. And a unified account is provided for the derivation of the Affected Passive Construction in Chinese as well as in Japanese and English, on the basis of Chomsky's Double Agreement Hypothesis (Chomsky 1999) and our affectee object hypothesis, Split T Hypothesis and the hypothesis about the syntactic status of bei.Following He's argument (何晓炜1999), we assume that nominal phrases are credited with their theta roles in LA: Affectee, Theme and Agent (optional). According to the order of merge proposed by Pan (1997), the verb first merges with the Theme NP, forming V. V merges with the Affectee NP, forming VP, which merges with v and v' is formed. According to Chomsky's assumptions in MI, the functional category v may select a nominal phrase as its external argument which should be introduced through Pure Merge. If there is an agent NP, it merges with v'. If no, the derived VP merges with v, forming vP.The derivation of get-passives is a little different. In which, XP, the extra Spec selected by its EPP feature and must be introduced by object shift, merges with v' to form vP.Then T_ten merges with vP, forming T_tenP. T_ten may have (?)-features and EPP feature if v has external argument. In that case, the EA moves to the position [Spec, T_ten'] to delete T_ten's uninterpretable features.For the last step, T_tenP merges with T_aff. T_aff has uninterpretable agreement features and EPP feature. So the Affectee NP moves to the position [Spec, T_aff'] to delete T_aff's uninterpretable features. All the uninterpretable features are eliminated and the derivation converges.