The Syntax Of The Modern Chinese Serial Predicate Construction: A Minimalist Approach

In modern Chinese expressions there exists one popularly used. expressive construction which can be represented as "N+VP1+VP2" semiotically. Zhu Dexi (1982) in his Lectures on Grammar defined it as Serial Predicate Construction. But opinions varied among different Linguists when it comes to its structure and derivation. While some Linguists termed it as the Serial verbal Constructions, others thought of it as the Objective-Subject Construction. Recently some other scholars have subsumed it into another construction:Simultaneous Verbal Construction. They differed in their analytical ways and theoretical frameworks. This thesis aims at a unified analysis of the three different constructions never achieved before. We will put our analysis under the theoretical framework of the Minimalist Program of Transformational Generative Grammar, assuming that they have the same sentence structure and derivational mechanism. And we will give them semantic explanations.This thesis is divided into six parts. Part one is the introduction, where we put forward our research questions and theoretical framework. Chapter one concerns itself with the extant analyses and points out their inadequacies. Chapter two enters into the discussion of the common ground of the three constructions and put forward our own analysis of a unified syntactical derivation. Chapter three discusses the motivation of the syntactic derivation of Serial Predicate Constructions. Chapter four talks about the universal property of the Chinese Serial predicate Construction and the last part is the conclusion.In this thesis, we spare no efforts to achieve a unified account of the three different constructions assumed by different scholars, which, in essence, is in accordance with the spirit of the Minimalist Program. That is, to construct the most explanatory theories in terms of the minimalist theoretical principles.