A Neurolinguistic Study On Syntactic Generative Mechanisms Of Subject Control Structure And Subject Raising Structure

Linguistic theory holds two different points of views of whether the generativemechanisms of Subject Control Structure and Subject Raising Structure are the same.On one hand, some linguists think that the generative mechanisms of Subject ControlStructure and Subject Raising Structure are different. Subject Raising Structure issyntactic movement structure and its subordinate subject is the residue of movement-Empty Category NP-trace while Subject Control Structure is not syntactic movementstructure and its subordinate subject is the basic-generated Empty Category PRO. Onthe other hand, some linguists, represented by Hornstein, demonstrate that thegenerative mechanism of Subject Control Structure is almost identical to that of SubjectRaising Structure, and both of them are syntactic movement structure. They claim thatthe subordinate subject of Subject Control Structure should be also analyzed as theresidue of movement-Empty Category NP-trace.Under the framework of Transformational Generative Grammar, by means ofEvent-related Potential technology, adopting sentence comprehension task, this paperinvestigates the generative mechanisms of Subject Control Structure, Subject RaisingStructure and sentences driven by verbs like “kaishi” so as to explore whether SubjectControl Structure and Subject Raising Structure are syntactic movement structures ornot and verbs like “kaishi” should be classified as Control Verb or Raising Verb. Incombination with the experimental results, this paper attempts to verify the relevantSyntactic Parsing Hypotheses, expecting to provide evidence support fromneurolinguistics for solving some controversies existing in the research of theoreticallinguistics.According to the experimental results, combined with the theoretical analysis, thispaper arrives at some main conclusions as follows:(1) Subject Control Structure is not syntactic movement structure and its generativeprocess does not involve syntactic movement processing. Hornstein’s MovementTheory of Control is not suitable for Chinese. Chinese Subject Raising Structure may besyntactic movement structure or not, but this result may be affected by sentencestructure complexity.(2) Sentences driven by verbs like “kaishi” are syntactic movement structure, containing syntactic movement operation. Verbs like “kaishi” do not assign thematicroles to their subjects, thus verbs like “kaishi” are more like Raising Verb rather thanControl Verb.(3) Whether Subject Control Construction and Subject Raising Constructioncontain Empty Categories is not certain, which we think may be affected by sentencestructure complexity.(4) The syntactic movement neuromechanism of sentences driven by verbs like“kaishi” relatively supports the syntactic parsing mechanism of “Trace ReactivationHypothesis”. The experiment’s results of this paper are consistent with contents ofneither “Direct Association Hypothesis” nor “Thematic Revision Hypothesis”.