A Study Of Chinese Raising Construction

In Chinese, word such as keneng ’possible’, yinggai ’should’, shi ’be’, you ’have’,kanqilai ’seem’, and nan ’difficult’ are raising predicates as they will trigger the subject NP inthe complement clause to raise; the sentence containing raising predicates is regarded asraising construction.Within the framework of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program, we probe into the syntacticfeatures of Chinese raising predicates and raising construction and make a comparativeanalysis between Chinese and English raising construction. Chinese raising predicates areone-place predicate and assign only one theta-role; such verbs do not bear any semanticrelation with the sentential subject. Chinese raising predicates can be classified into threetypes: epistemic modal verbs, aspectual verbs, and tough verbs. As the main verbs in thesentence, raising predicates displays the following characteristics: firstly, they can be negatedby bu ’not’ or fei ’not’; secondly, they can form A-not-A questions; thirdly, they can occur atthe end of a sentence and select a clause as its subject.The similarities as well as differences exist between English and Chinese raising arealso analyzed. Both English and Chinese raising constructions are the joint result of EPP andCFC feature checking. The strong P-feature of the light verb v in English requires that Englishraising be obligatory; on the contrary, light verb v in Chinese sometimes carries strongP-feature and sometimes a weak one. The strong P-feature requires the subject to raise, whilethe weak P-feature allows raising in Chinese to be optional.The study in this thesis provides empirical evidence from English and Chinese forChomsky’s proposal that the EPP feature is universal while P-features vary parametricallyamong languages. The typological differences of human languages are the differences ofdefault strength of features.