A Minimalist Study Of The Bei Sentence In Mandarin Chinese

The BEI sentence is one of the most challenging topics in Chinese syntactic study. The study of the BEI sentence mainly focuses on the two aspects: the syntactic status of BEI and the derivational process of the BEI sentence. Linguists are divided on the status of BEI. The representative opinions about BEI are the preposition assumption, the verb assumption, and the auxiliary assumption and so on. No agreement has been reached over this issue.There are different kinds of BEI sentences in Chinese, ranging from 10 to more than 30. This thesis discusses four typical Chinese BEI sentences, the long passive, the short passive, the BEI sentence with the retained object and those with resumptive pronouns. The thesis explores the derivation of the BEI sentence in accordance with Chomsky’s Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework. BEI is a special functional category in Chinese, whose strong passive feature needs a passive object with theme role or experiencer role in Spec position. BEI selects a transitive structure vP, and then derives the BEI sentence by movement.Given that there is no presupposed structure in Chomsky’s Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework, we face new questions of the order of Merge, realization of thematic roles and the derivation of the BEI sentence. So the author puts forward two assumptions. First, NP has obtained its thematic role in lexical array(LA), and the order of merger is adjusted and controlled by the thematic roles. Second, merger includes external merger and internal merger. Some internal mergers are overtly realized in linear representation, some are not. We also suppose an abstract tense in Chinese to check the case feature of the subject NP. Thus, the explanation can agree with the language intuition of Mandarin Chinese. This thesis believes that the derivational processes of both the long passive and the short passive are identical. The structure is [T[BeiP[Bei][vP]]]. The differences between them lie in the fact that there are two ‘bei’ in the LA of the long passive. One is the functional category, the other is a preposition. In light of the Equi-Deletion principle, the preposition ‘bei’ is deleted at PF.Based on these assumptions, this thesis discussed the derivation of the BEI sentence with retained object. With regard to the BEI sentence with resumptive pronoun, this thesis proposes that this kind of passive sentence in Chinese is derived via partial deletion of the copy of the moved internal argument.This thesis provides a tentative and unified explanation for the derivation of the four typical Chinese BEI sentence. The other types of the BEI sentence in Mandarin Chinese need further study.