A Minimalist Account Of The Objective Ba Construction In Mandarin Chinese

Because of the structural deviation from the canonical Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order andchallenges to different theoretical frameworks, the Chinese BA constructions have been one of the mostheatedly debated topics among linguistics at home and abroad.The BA constructions are usually classified into four types: the objective, causative, locative andinstrumental BA constructions. The objective BA construction is the only focus in this thesis. In theobjective BA constructions, the noun following BA (NPBA) is the direct object as well as the internalargument of the matrix verb, and also bears the patient role.On the basis of the former research achievements, this thesis tries to find out the remaining problems,and then has a concrete analysis of the syntactic attributes of the main components in this typical structure.Firstly, the NPBAwhich is base-generated in the specifier position of the main verb has the specificindefinite property. Apart from this, the NPBAalso satisfies the topic attributes listed by Tsao (1986), so itcan be as the subtopic of the whole sentence (while the subject is the main topic of the whole sentence).Secondly, among the previous researches, BA is considered as a verb, a preposition, a case marker, a headin the Cause Phrase, an affix-like functor, and so on. However, none of them can give a convincingexplanation. Making use of the trait of the preposition of the NPBA, the author testifies that BA belongs tothe functional category, and pinpoints that the BA Phrase is a Topic phrase, of which BA is a head andpossesses the EPP-feature driving the movement of the NPBA. Thirdly, with the help of Vendler’s (1967)Event Structure Theory, the verbs can be classified into four kinds, activities, states, achievements andaccomplishments. By comparison and analysis, it reaches the conclusion that the matrix verbs in the BAconstructions are bounded and delimited. Finally, under the framework of the Minimalist Framework (MP),based on the basic syntactic computation including Merge, Agree, and Move, in addition to the FeatureChecking Theory, the key part of this paper is to explore the derivational process of the objective BAconstructions in mandarin Chinese.Complying with Chomsky’s (1995) multiple specifier hypotheses, the light verb can have twospecifiers. One inner specifier is the External Argument (EA) of the light verb, which matches and agrees with the nominal phrase in VP, and is assigned the accusative case by v. The other is attracted by the EPPfeature of the light verb. Due to the fact that Chinese is an aspect language, the EPP feature of thefunctional category Aspect triggers it to move to the Spec-ASPP, deleting the EPP feature of ASP, and getsthe nominative case. Subsequently, the strong EPP feature of BA drives its movement to the specifierposition of the Topic1Phrase (Top1P). Since BA is a topic marker of the subtopic, the subject is the maintopic of the whole sentence. By copying and deletion, BA is merged with the null head of the Top2P and itsspecifier must be filled because of BA’s strong feature, completing the whole syntactic computation.This paper makes a tentative exploration to the syntactic derivation of the objective BA constructions,but does not touch upon the locative/instructional BA constructions and the causative BA constructions.Additionally, some details need to be further studied.