A Minimalist Approach To Word Order

This thesis is a theoretical investigation of word order and linearization of natural languages couched in the Principles and Parameters framework, and especially the recent developments within the Minimalist Program.One of the fundamental issues in the design of CHL (Computation of Human Language) is how to relate sound and meaning. Linearization plays an important role in this computational process. In this paper, we are trying to figure out a universal mechanism to realize the six possible word orders combined by subject, verb, and object (S-V-O, S-O-V, V-S-O, V-O-S, O-S-V, O-V-S) in the Minimalist Program. As far as we know, there are quite a number of proposals concerning this issue in both GB (Government and Binding) theory and the Minimalist Program. We will cover a detailed introduction to the solutions to linearization presented in the existing literature and make analysis and comparisons from different perspectives.There are four important points in our proposal; first of all, we assume that the language computational system has completed the calculation process which only involves the abstract categories before lexical materials inserted to the syntactic structure. Put another way, what do children acquire is the way that the language computational system calculates different categories of its own language. After that, when they are able to complete the full hierarchical syntactic structure, they only have to learn the language-specific lexicon. Hence, in our proposal, we illustrate the derivation process only with abstract categories rather than specific lexical items. Secondly, Merge is inherently asymmetric in theory and by taking feature inclusion into account; it can determine the basic syntactic structure. Thirdly, we suggest that there are two light verbs in the syntactic structure and the higher one agrees with the subject and the lower one agrees with the object and also in order to adjust the whole structure to enjoy an asymmetric c-command relation, the spec-head agreement is required and the object has to be base-generated at the position of spec-VP. Last, feature strength causes movement, and Edge Feature enables Merge to operate without limit. Besides, the theory of Pied-Piping which can induce vP-chunk movement is employed to explain some word orders which are exceptionally difficult to deal with.