A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Empty Categories In "The Family Of Red Sorghum"

This thesis is designed to make a comparative study between English and Chinese empty categories within the framework of GB theory.Empty category refers to those special elements which have no overt phonetic form but still perform syntactic and semantic functions.Since Chomsky proposed empty category in Lectures on Government and Binding,scholars from different countries have been devoted to extensive and in-depth exploration of the linguistic phenomenon.The research on empty category benefits us in better comprehending the syntactic properties of different languages,and helps us to further probe into the semantic and structural features of human language.So far,although domestic and foreign linguists have conducted numerous studies on the English and Chinese empty categories from different perspectives,few researches use certain text as corpus,and few researchers study them systematically in a comparative method from the viewpoint of GB Theory.Therefore,this thesis looks into the similarities and differences between English and Chinese empty categories in Red Sorghum within the framework of GB theory.The thesis has pointed out that NP-trace and PRO in English and Chinese are similar in terms of distribution and relevant properties,while English and Chinese empty categories mainly differ in wh-trace and pro.They have distinctive characteristics in specific sentence structures.Pro doesn't exist in English while does exist in Chinese.English wh-trace is produced by obligatory movement of wh-elements.On the contrary,there is no overt wh-movement at surface structure in Chinese.Wh-trace in Chinese can be found in LF wh-movement.In general,empty categories in English and Chinese are the same in nature.By employing a comparative research of empty categories in both English and Chinese on the basis of GB theory,the study attempts to analyze the similarities and differences between them.Moreover,the thesis is aimed at further exploring the general properties of empty categories so as to dig out the syntactic and semantic representations in the two languages.It is hoped to provide some enlightenment fortranslation and second language acquisition.