On The Syntax Of Chinese Null Subject

Empty Category refers to the constituent bearing syntactic and semantic functions without overt phonetic form in sentence.Since Chomsky proposed this concept in 1981,many linguists home and abroad have devoted themselves into the researching about it.And some achievements of Chinese Empty Category have been made in continuous debate.However,some problems like the classification of Chinese Empty Category,especially for the empty subject or null subject are still in dispute.Hence,this thesis attempts to make a study on Chinese null subjects PRO and pro mainly using Theta Theory,and Control Theory to analyze their motivation of existence,syntactic features,distribution and reference properties within the framework of Chomsky's Transformational Generative Grammar,aiming to make a better understanding of the nature of language and Chomsky's Universal Grammar as well as the Principle and Parameter Theory.Besides,this thesis also attempts to make a cross-linguistic comparison between Chinese and English null subjects.This comparison can not only reflect the specific features of Chinese,but also can instruct us to achieve better second language acquisition and translation work.Chomsky proposes that null subject consists of two subtypes:namely PRO and pro,which are subjected to the empty categories base-generated in the subject position.PRO is distributed in the non-finite clauses where the position is ungoverned,while pro occurs in the subject position of finite clauses.Hence,whether there exist finite and non-finite clauses in Chinese is the key to figure out the existence of Chinese null subject.Different linguists hold different views on this issue.In the light of James Huang's(1982,1984,1987,1989)analysis about this issue,this paper first makes a distinction between elliptical subject and null subject,holding that the reference of null subject can be identified within the scope of single sentence(Intra-sentential Reference Identity)and it can't be easily recovered.After that,this paper argues that there is a finite versus non-finite distinction in Chinese.Further,it confirms the existence of PRO in the subject position of Chinese non-finite clause based on some empirical proofs and theoretical proofs.Besides,it concludes that PRO in Chinese is a pronominal anaphor which cannot be lexicalized.The interpretation of PRO in Chinese is affected not only by syntactic structures but also by lexical-semantic factors.To be specific,exhaustive control exists widely in Chinese.PRO in Chinese is subject control in verbal complement structure and serial verb structure,object control in pivotal structure and arbitrary control in verbal subject structure.Besides,PRO is controlled by the joint of subject and object when it occurs in the embedded sentence with the predicative verb of accompanying meaning,namely joint verb,in the matrix sentence.What's more,this thesis argues that the absence of subject in the finite clause in Chinese is actually a kind of ellipsis,namely discourse deletion.There is no pro in Chinese.Comparing null subjects between Chinese and English,this paper concludes that pro doesn't exist in both languages,while PRO does.And PRO in both languages shares similar properties in terms of syntactic features,distribution and interpretation.Whereas,compared with English.the distinction of finite and non-finite clause in Chinese seems to be more complex.What's more,the degree of unlexicalization of Chinese null subject is lower than that of English null subject,but the dependence on context of Chinese null subject is higher than that of English null subject.