A Syntactic Study On Tough Construction In English And Chinese

Based on the the syntactic properties of English and Chinese Tough Construction, thisstudy attempts to investigate the derivation of English and Chinese Tough Constructionwithin the framework of Feature Checking Theory and Phase Theory and makes acomparison between English and Chinese Tough Construction.Yoon-Suk Chung defines Tough Construction. Tough Construction refers a structure inwhich a small class of adjectives-tough adjectives-such as tough, easy, etc. has a matrixsubject which is notionally understood as the ‘missing’ object of a verb or a preposition in anembedded infinitival phrase. According to the definition of Tough Construction, we can find“NP+nan/ronegyi/hao+VP” construction is correspondent to Tough Construction in Chinese.The properties of English and Chinese Tough Construction are described from thesyntactic perspective, and then the derivation of English and Chinese Tough Construction isillustrated respectively. In terms of the syntactic features and semantic features, similaritiesbetween English and Chinese Tough Construction are displayed in six aspects:1) ToughConstruction in English and Chinese is Predicate-Complement structure.2) Tough adjectiveacts as the predicate in the sentence.3) The tough adjectives express the meaning of easinessand difficulty. The adjective in Tough Construction is constraint to the tough adjective.4) Thematrix subject is coreferential to the object in embedded infinitival phrase.5) The agent isimplicit. It must be introduced by the preposition for or duiyu......(laishuo).6) The toughadjective describes a whole event. They have strong event feature. However, differences alsoexist between English and Chinese Tough Construction. The differences are presented asfollows:1) English Tough Construction can be transformed into sentential sentence, however,Chinese Tough Construction can not.2) English Tough Construction has obvious tensefeatures, while the tense affixes, such as zhe, le, guo, are not carried by Chinese ToughConstruction.3) the verb in English Tough Construction is introduced by infinitival mark to,but the verb in Chinese Tough Construction has no such feature.Furthermore, combining the comparison between English and Chinese ToughConstruction with the inherent features of language, this thesis gives a unified account for thedifferences between English and Chinese Tough Construction. English and Chinese Tough Construction have more similarities than differences. Both of them have gone through Merge,Agree and Move operation to make the object move out of the embedded verb to the subjectposition. Chinese is a language that lacks of inflection, so Chinese Tough Construction needpercolation operation to derive sentence when it lacks of the inflectional mark I, which isdifferent from English Tough Construction. By percolating, Chinese Tough Construction cancontinue to merge smoothly.