A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Empty Categories In "A Brief History Of Chinese Philosophy"

This thesis is a comparative study of the empty categories within the framework of TG theory.Although a lot of researches have been conducted to account for empty categories both in English and Chinese,there are few scholars who have systematically studied English and Chinese empty categories in a comparative way within the framework of TG theory so far,so few researches combine the EC studies with certain book as corpus.Due to this reason the present thesis is designed to analyze and explain the similarities and differences between English and Chinese empty categories in A Short History of Philosophy from the perspective of TG theory.Empty category refers to a certain type of noun phrases which exists in the deep structure of human language but does not have any phonetic realization in the surface structure.Since Chomsky put forward the Government and Binding Theory in the 1980's,a lot of researches have been devoted to empty categories in different languages.The research has found out that English and Chinese NP-traces and PROs have similar distribution and properties.In accordance with the concept of causativity,this thesis classifies the matrix verbs of bi-constituent sentences into four types.Then this thesis further studies bi-constituent sentences with PRO and gets the conclusion that the bi-constituent in the bi-constituent sentence which contains a PRO concerned in our research only serves as the object of the matrix verb.While the differences between Chinese and English empty categories lie mainly in English and Chinese variables and the existence or non-existence of pros.The comparative study of English and Chinese empty categories from the perspective of TG theory is not only essential to find out the syntactic features of Chinese and English,but also provides us with a new perspective on the explanation of the Chinese Grammar,so that it may help us better understand the nature of human languages.