A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Empty Categories From The Perspective Of TG Theory

In 1981, Chomsky put forward his Government and Binding theory, which is shortened to GB theory. GB theory is a giant and complex theoretical system, of which Empty Category (shortened to EC) is an important component. According to Chomsky, in English, in addition to overt elements, there also exist covert elements syntactically. These covert elements bear no forms of phonetics, but possess the functions of grammar and semantics, and these elements are termed as Empty Category. EC is a very important and typical theory in the English language. On the basis of many years'study of English EC, more and more linguists from different countries have been trying to apply the research findings into their native language studies. Chinese linguists, such as Xu Liejiong, Hu Jianhua, Shen Yang, Han Jingquan and Huang Zhengde have done excellent jobs in this field.EC plays a very important role in helping us to maintain the extant theories and to further explain the language mechanism. What is more, the research on EC benefits us a lot in a better understanding of the nature of languages, e.g. the similarities and differences between languages and their specific properties.Although EC does not appear in form, it plays the same function as an overt element syntactically. The study of EC is one of the important issues in the research field of transformational generative theory (shortened to TG theory). Based on the syntactic features of [±anaphora] and [±pronominal], Chomsky classified English EC into four types: NP-trace, Wh-trace, PRO and pro, among which NP-trace and Wh-trace are generated by movement, while PRO and pro are base-generated.There are lots of researches on EC in the linguistic field nowadays. However, there are few linguists who have systematically studied English and Chinese ECs in a comparative way within the framework of TG theory so far. Owing to this reason, the present thesis is designed to reanalyze and reexplain the similarities and differences between English and Chinese ECs from the perspective of TG theory. The research has found out that English and Chinese NP-traces and PROs have similar distribution and properties, while the differences between Chinese and English ECs lie mainly in English and Chinese Wh-movements and the existence or non-existence of pro (for instance, in English, Wh-movement is obligatory while in Chinese Wh-movement is not necessary; as to the pro, it does not exist in English while it does exist in Chinese).The comparative study of English and Chinese ECs from the perspective of TG theory helps us not only to dig out the overall properties of the covert ECs of the two languages, but also to open a new path to reveal and explain the deep syntactic features of English and Chinese languages.