A Minimalist Program Approach To The Jianyu Construction In Chinese

The Jianyu construction, as a special Chinese syntactic phenomenon, has longbeen paid attention to by Chinese linguists. Its syntactic representation can besummarized as NP₁+VP₁+NP₂+VP₂, among which we can clearly see that NP₂can beeither regarded as the object of VP1or the subject of VP₂, for which this structure iscalled Jianyu construction. Despite efforts under the traditional grammar, there hasn’tbeen a complete picture of its syntactic function and derivation process. With theboom of Transformational-generative grammar represented by Chomsky in1980s,domestic scholars started to study the syntactic function and derivation process ofJianyu construction within the generative grammar framework. But the studies on theJianyu Construction also differ from each other mainly because whether they admitthe existence of PRO or not.This thesis, under the framework of Minimalist Program and especially from theperspective of Hornstein’s control theory, is endeavoring to prove that the JianyuConstruction in Chinese is a subcategory of control construction for its sharingfeatures with control construction in English. Moreover, being similar to controlconstructions in English, empty subjects in the Jianyu Constructions can also becategorized into OC PRO and NOC PRO. This perspective also gives us thepossibility to avoid a long-existing dispute among Chinese linguists----the finitenessand non-finiteness in Chinese. Moreover, this study tries to modify and improveHornstein’s assumptions by categorizing OC PRO into NP-trace and eventuallycomes up with a more suitable solution to the derivation of the Jianyu Construction inChinese. Another benefit brought by this study is that we are allowed to eliminateredundant concepts such as PRO Theorem and null case under GB framework, whichis consistent with the Principle of Economy of language.