A Syntactic Study Of The Bi-Constituent Construction In Mandarin Chinese

Special constructions have always been hot topics in studies of Mandarin Chinese.The Bi-Constituent construction(the BC construction),as a special sentence pattern,has aroused extensive attention among researchers of the Chinese language.The syntactic representation of the BC construction is “NP1+V1+NP2+VP2”,whose particularity lies in the dual identity of NP2,which is semantically the object of V1 and also the subject of VP2.This is why it is called the Bi-Constituent construction.Different studies of the BC construction concerns different aspects of it.In traditional grammar,research mainly focus on the definition and explanation of the special dual identity of Jianyu(i.e.,NP2),and most of the studies are descriptive ones,and were not concerned with its syntactic structures and functions.Along with the development of modern linguistics,more and more researchers tend to analyze the BC construction in Mandarin Chinese within the updated theories,and try to make better explanations of its syntactic and semantic features as well as its process of derivation.This thesis will provide a generative syntactic exploration of the BC construction employing Landau?s theory of control and James Huang?s finite and non-finite distinction.Particularities of the BC construction also lie in the causative meaning of V1.This research classifies the construction into four types on the basis of the causative degree of V1.It is argued that sentences with the first two types of verbs are the typical BC constructions,and those with the other two types belong to the BC constructions only when used in the syntactic structure ?NP1+V1+NP2+VP2?.Based on this classification of the BC construction,the thesis makes an analyses of its syntactic and semantic features,as well as its type of control.It is proposed that though there is no obvious tense markers in Chinese,there still exists ways to express tense through aspect markers,modal verbs and so on.From all the detailed analyses,we find out that there is a non-finite clause with a null subject PRO in the deep structure of the BC construction.Moreover,PRO is controlled by its antecedents in the sentences themselves,the control constructions in the BC construction can be divided into exhaustive control and partial control,or subject control,object control,subject and object mutual control according to the pronominal properties of PRO.In most cases,object control is the most typical one.There exist other sentence patterns which have the same syntactic structure as the BC construction,such as Serial Verb Construction(SVC)and Subject-predicate Object Construction(SPOC).Through their comparison,we will get more syntactic and semantic features of the BC construction.