On The Syntax Of Chinese Verb Copying Sentence

The verb copying sentence is a special Chinese sentence pattern. Since Wang Li(1944)mentioned this sentence pattern, a lot of linguists have made extensive and profound studies.Although their studies provide much enlightenment, there are still some deficiencies.Therefore, this thesis attempts to redefine Chinese verb copying sentence, analyze the features and syntactic status of its main constituents and derive this kind of sentence pattern within the framework of Minimalist Program. Finally, it compares CVCS and English SVOC pattern.The thesis redefines Chinese verb copying sentence as a sentence pattern with two identical verb and one verb is followed by an object and the other verb is followed by a complement. Then it classifies this sentence pattern into marked and unmarked verb copying sentence. Different linguists hold different thoughts about the features of predicate1 and complement. This thesis assumes that predicate1 has the property of noun phrase and can be regarded as a topic. And the complement can be acted as by different types of constituent and can have different semantic directions. From the perspective of diachrony, the thesis insists that de and le should be regarded as the light verb.Within the framework of Minimalist Program, the thesis mainly puts up with the derivation of marked verb copying sentence and unmarked verb copying sentence. There is a verb light in Chinese verb copying sentence. It triggers the verb to move to its position and merge with it. Because the sub topic and main topic both have EPP feature and Topic feature,they attract respectively DP in Spec-vP and Spec-VP to Spec-TopmP and Spec-Tops P. What's more, the thesis adopts Cheng Gong's(1999) Generalized Transformation. It takes the copied verb as a filler word and embeds it into the representation of the verb copying sentence. After merge, movement and feature checking, Chinese verb copying sentence is derived.Finally, on the basis of the comparison between CVCS and English SVOC pattern, the thesis points out the similarities and differences of the two sentence patterns. They both can be regarded as a sentence pattern with a non-finite small clause. What' more, the small clausecan be acted as by different constituents. As for their differences, their syntactic categories are different and there is a copy of the verb in CVCS instead of English SVOC pattern.