| The 'Possessor-Subject Possessee-Object Sentence' (Guo 1990; abbreviated as PSPO sentence), as exemplified by Wang Mian qisuishang sile fuqin ('When Wang Mian was seven years old, his father died'), is a disputable syntactic structure in Mandarin Chinese. Questions regarding this structure are: 'How can the unaccusative verb take both a subject and an object?', 'What are the theta-roles played by the Possessor and the Possessee?', 'What Cases do the Possessor and the Possessee receive?' and 'How is the PSPO sentence derived?'Up to now, there are two schools of opinion about the Possessor's initial position in the PSPO sentence. One is the movement hypothesis (Xu 1999, 2001; Han 2000; Wen & Chen 2001) - that the Possessor moves out from the specifier position of the Possessee to the subject position of the whole sentence according to a 'Possessor-raising rule'; the other is the base-generation hypothesis (Zhu 2005; Pan & Han 2005) - that the Possessor is base-generated rather than moved. After reviewing all the previous studies we propose a new analysis of the PSPO sentence based on Chomsky's (2000) Minimalist Inquiries and Rizzi's (1997, 2001, 2004) 'split CP hypothesis'.We propose a new movement analysis which is different from the previous one. While the previous movement hypothesis holds that the Possessor moves to the [Spec, TP] position, we assume that it ends up at the [Spec, TopP] position with the TopP split by the CP. Because the topic position is a non-argument position, the moved Possessor shares the same Case and theta-role with its lower copies. In this thesis, we only argued that the Possessor and the Possessee together can get a Nominative Case as a whole DP, without going deep into its separate constituents. We also compare two similar constructions relating the PSPO sentence, clarifying when the PSPO sentence can be derived. After a detailed study, we conclude that the so-called Possessor is in fact an internally-moved topic expressing old information.
|
PDF Full Text Request