The Syntax Of The New Bei Construction

The Chinese traditional bei construction is one of the special Chinese sentence structures. The earliest phrases about the new bei construction are bei zisha, bei jiuye, bei xiaokang etc., and the new bei construction has shown up on the Internet and even in many influential media in China since2009. It has already been understood and accepted by most of Chinese netizens. Also, it has the tendency of generalization and plays an important role in language communication.Interestingly, there is no such limitation that the verb following bei has to be a nonvolitional verb, but it can be a volitional verb, a noun, an adjective, or a transitive verb. It is very different from the traditional bei construction. It is thus clear that the syntactic position immediately behind the bei has been a relatively free position in the new bei construction.There are many studies on different aspects of the new bei construction, such as diachronic aspect(冯地云2010),logical aspect(段益民2010),sociological aspect(刘红妮2010),semantic aspect(刘杰、邵敬敏2010),pragmatic aspect (傅开平、彭吉军2009),syntactic aspect(刘杰、邵敬敏2010)etc.. However, the studies on the syntactic aspect are far from perfect, and this thesis explores the syntactic derivational process of the new bei construction.Before exploring the syntactic derivational process of the new bei construction, this thesis discusses the categorical status of the Chinese character bei, and taking bei as a light verb is more reasonable. Besides, this thesis also represents the generation process of Chinese traditional long and short bei constructions.In the spirit of the Merge, Move and Feature Checking Theory of Minimalist Program, this thesis investigates the syntactic derivational processes of the new bei constructions and considers the processes contain three steps.The first step:NP+volitional verb/noun/adjective/nonvolitional verb. The noun or the adjective is used as a verb which involves verb causativization to participate the generating operation in this construction.The second step:X+shi+NP+volitional verb/noun/adjective/nonvolitional verb. The language background of the new bei construction is that there exists an outside force which uses abnormal ways to make the agent do/to be considered/to be said like something. However, the volitional verb used in the new bei construction contradicts with the meanings of volitional verb. Therefore, this thesis adds an out side force, namely, the real agent and the verb shi. Thus, this construction belongs to more close to the meaning that the speakers want to express. The author finds that this construction is bi-functional constituent construction, and it is similar to the English SVOC construction. This thesis makes a comparison of the two constructions.The third step:NP+bei+volitional verb/noun/adjective/nonvolitional verb. The passive form of bi-functional constituent construction is similar to the English SVOC construction. The passive meaning of bi-functional constituent construction is taken by the light verb bei. When bei enters into the passive of bi-functional constituent construction, the verb following bei is equivalent to the English past participle. They both lose the ability to assign accusative case to the original object and are not able to assign Agent theta role of the original subject. Thus the original object has to move to get accusative case. What is more, in Chinese, shi and bei can not coexist, for one sentence can not be both active and passive at the same time. Hence, in the process of syntactic derivation, shi is deleted. Finally, the new bei construction is generated through merge, movement and deletion operation.