A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Raising Structures In The Framework Of MP

As early as in the year of 1974, Postal made a detailed research on raising verbs in his book On Raising. One of his contributions in this book was that he made a reasonable classification of raising verbs. According to Postal, the raising verbs could be divided into three types: first, the subject-to-subject raising verbs represented by appear, which are called A-verbs; second, the object-to-subject raising verbs like believe, which are termed B-verbs; third, another type of object-to-subject raising verbs like convince, which are referred to as C-verbs. In 1990s, Chomsky, the founder of Transformational Generative linguistics, agreed that a subject-to-subject raising operation is involved in Postal's A-verbs; however, he held a quite different view concerning Postal's B-verbs. He denied the existence of any raising operation with respect to B-verbs. Then Chomsky created a new concept, which is known as Subject Raising based on his earnest research. Some verbs like seem, appear, turn out and so on are usually called raising verbs syntactically, because the subject or object of the clause is raised to the subject position of the main clause when the movement is triggered. And the structures containing raising verbs are called Raising Structures.There are many researches on the Raising Structure both at home and abroad. Scholars like Huang Zhengde, Tsao Fengfu, Barron, Carnie, Chomsky and so on are prominent in this field. However, there are few linguists who have made a comparative study of English and Chinese Raising Structures within the framework of Minimalist Program (shortened to MP) so far. Just for this reason, the present thesis is designed to conduct a comparative analysis of English and Chinese Raising Structures on the theoretical basis of Chomsky's MP. It is found through research that NP Movement plays an important role in the raising process, as the raising verb can cause the NP in CP to be moved in the raising course; Case theory explains not only the distribution in syntactic structures but also why some NP movements are compulsory. Moreover, in most case, subject raising is aroused just for the sake of Case assignment. The research has also revealed the similarities and differences between English and Chinese Raising Structures. Their similarities lie in that the generative motivation of English and Chinese Raising Structures originate in the joint work of Extended Projection Principle (EPP) and the feature checking of Core Functional Categories (including C--- complementiser, T---tense and v---light verb); their differences can be summarized as following: because of the different parameterization of the P-features of the light verb v, the subject raising in English is obligatory, while it is optional in Chinese.The comparative analysis of English and Chinese Raising Structures on the basis of MP theory has testified Chomsky's claim about Extended Projection Principle, that is, EPP features are universal, while P-features vary parametrically among languages. Also the typological differences of languages come from the discrepancies of Core Functional Categories. The study presented in this thesis is of much benefit not only to a reasonable and deeper understanding of English and Chinese Raising Structures but also to the rapid acquisition and efficient application of them in English and Chinese languages.