Bei Passives In Modern Chinese: Derivation By Phase

The complexity of BEI passives lies in the problem of Case assignment and theproperty of BEI. This paper makes a summary of what the academic world proposesabout BEI’s property and the syntactic derivation of BEI passives. Previous studyconcentrates on the stipulations or description of the syntactic structures of passiveclauses, which lacks cyclicity and uniformity, deviant from UG. Therefore I advocatederiving the clauses phase by phase within the minimalist framework, and solving theproblem of Case assignment by referring to the latest Case theory within theframework. Derivation of clauses is a dynamic process, so is that of BEI passives,which is derived by phases dynamically. I advance three hypotheses. First, BEI is afunctional category whose “absorbing” of the uninterpretable features from light verbde-functionalizes it and entails it the features so as to assign Case to the originalexternal argument. Second, passive phrases parallel vPs, and therefore passive phrasescan be phases. Third, traditional passives and new passives are in complementarydistribution, and in theory more than two BEIs can occur in the same clause.