A Syntactic Study On The Causative Constructions In English And Chinese:a Minimalist Approach

Causation, as an important syntactic and semantic category, is a pervasive phenomenon in human languages. Causative constructions are one of the most important types of syntactic constructions in Chinese and considered as important as active and passive constructions in typology. They have played an important role in the recent history of linguistics. Causative constructions are important because their study involves the interaction of various components of the over-all linguistic description such as syntax, semantics and so on. A large quantity of work on causatives has been done from different perspectives by former scholars, but most of them are descriptionary in nature without a full investigation and enough explanation of the syntactic derivation process of causative constructions, especially under the framework of Minimalist Program. Besides, few have touched upon the universals between Chinese and English Causative constructions. This research is intended to discuss the syntactic generation mechnism of causative constructions in English and Chinese so as to make a unified analysis of the syntactic derivation of causatives in both of them within the framework of generative grammar, especially the Minimalist Program as well as a tentative exploration into the universals between these two languages, which will provide a new perspective for the future study in this field.There are five chapters in this thesis. Chapter one is the introduction which involves the research questions, research significance, research methodology as well as the organization of the thesis. Chapter two reviews the achievements made by former researchers and includes the comments of the author on them. Chapter three is concerned with the theoretical framework employed in this thesis. Chapter four is mainly related to the discussion of the syntactic derivation process of causative constructions in English and Chinese as well as the universals lying in causative constructions of these two languages. Chapter five is the conclusion with the major findings and the limitations of the current study.Compared with the previous researches made on causative constructions, the innovation of this study is that the author adopts the latest theories within the Minimalist Program, involving the VP-internal Subject Hypothesis, the Light Verb Hypothesis, Merge and Movement as well as the Principle of Economy. On the basis of these theories, the author claims that English and Chinese causative constructions can be given a unified analysis of their syntactic derivation under MP by assuming the existence of a light verb vcause which is covert and affixal in nature. At the same time, the universals lying in English and Chinese causatives is also touched up on in this study.