Syntactic Derivation Of English Existentials

This thesis aims to explore how Englsih existential constructions, existentials for short, are derived in Minimalist Program framework. Firstly, this thesis introduces the definition and classification of existentials. Then it reviews previous researches on existentials under Principles and Parameters theory and Minimalist Program made by generative linguists. Their researches mainly focus on the syntactic status of there, the case assignment of the postverbal NP and the Definiteness Effect, the derivation of English existentials, etc. To sum up, previous researches have made great achievements, but there are still discrepancies on the above problems.After careful examinations on previous researches, this thesis basically agrees on Tang's(唐玉柱2001,2005)opinion that there does have meaning and it can be an independent argument when locative prepositional phrase (LP) does not appear and existential verbs have two internal arguments:theme and location. Meanwhile, he distinguishes the differences between existential verbs and common unaccusative verbs. This thesis further proposes that there can be an independent argument regardless of whether LP appears or not and further verifies that there can indicate the general and abstract locative meaning. Moreover, there has the status of a pronoun and can be a syntactic subject. When there co-indexes with LP, there and LP are in the cataphoric relationship. This thesis also holds that LP bears [+N] feature and it has case requirement. In the construction LP+V+NP, it is a subject and also one argument of existential verbs. Furthermore, this thesis suggests that LP+V+NP is not an inversion construction. Whether NP or LP is the syntactic subject depends on the eventive meanings of light verbs.On the basis of above mentioned, by adopting the argument hierarchy proposed by Grimshaw (1990), the vp-shell hypothesis put forward by Larson (1988; 1991), the uniform theta-assignment hypothesis/UTAH argued by Baker (1988), as well as Freeze's (1992) view that existential verbs bear [+Loc] feature, this thesis reanalyzes the derivation of existential constructions. This thesis maintains that there is an existential light verb v which bears [+locative] feature and has a VP core as its complement, there/LP moves from [spec, VP] to [Spec, vp] to check its [+Loc] feature and then moves to [Spec, IP] driven by case feature checking.This thesis proposes that the postverbal NP is assigned accusative case by existential verb and the evidence is that the passive form of three-predicate verbs such as give, put, etc., which include a prepositional phrase as one of their arguments, can assign accusative case to their direct objects. This indicates that the semantic feature of v decides external argument in a sentence and that prepositional phrase can be a subject. This thesis also uses Attract F theory (Chomsky 1995) to explain the agreement phenomena between existential verbs and their postverbal NPs.