The Syntactic Derivation Of English Psych-verb Construction With Tough-alternation

Both psych-verb constructions and tough-constructions have sparked a lot of discussions,mainly on the syntactic structure.However,no in-depth study has been conducted on this unique type of English psych-verb construction like These pictures annoy me to look at(Pesetsky 1987),which takes an English object experiencer(OE)psych verb as a main predicate and meanwhile displays two core syntactic properties of English tough-constructions(Lasnik and Fiengo 1974).Thus,this thesis is aimed at deeply exploring the characteristics of this kind of construction in order to make up for defects of previous research on psych verbs and shed light on the syntactic analysis of tough-constructions.In this thesis,we first define the psych-verb construction from two aspects of classification and distributional constraints through comparison and data analysis and make an in-depth exploration of its syntactic derivational mechanism within the Minimalist Program(Chomsky 1995,2000,etc.).Secondly,a comparative analysis between this kind of construction and English tough-constructions on syntactic properties is made and we further explore a unified derivational mechanism of seven types of English tough-construction.Finally,we conclude the similarities and differences between English and Chinese tough-constructions based on the analysis of three controversial issues concerning the Chinese tough-construction-namely the Chinese nan/yi construction,including the grammatical function of the initial DP,the syntactic category of the after-adjective verb and the existence of passive Chinese tough-constructions.Through the research,this paper finds that:(i)this kind of English psych-verb construction should be classified as the third type of English psych-verb construction with a defining property of tough-alternation,which displays the following distributional constraints: the initial subject is often an inanimate DP or QP,and sometimes an animate DP is also appropriate but it is banned from serving as an agent;the matrix predicate can only be an OE psych verb;the embedded verb can be a transitive or unergative verb indicating state or activity but the unergative verb must be followed by a corresponding preposition that plays the role of introducing an argument.And in terms of the syntactic derivational mechanism,the psych verbs in this kind of construction are two-place predicates and there are two important operations involved in the derivation,relativization and extraposition,which made the initial subject adjoined by a relativized non-finite CP base-generated in the complement position of the lexical psych verb and the CP is finally attached to the whole structure by extraposition.(ii)The derivation mechanism of this English psych-verb construction can be successfully applied to a unified syntactic analysis of the English tough-construction.(iii)In the Chinese nan/yi construction,the initial DP occupies a matrix subject position and the verb after the adjective is a non-finite TP and so-called passive Chinese tough-constructions do not exist;and there exist the following similarities and differences between English and Chinese tough-constructions: from the syntactic perspective,on the one hand,both their sentence-initial constituents function as sentence subjects;on the other hand,for English tough-constructions,embedded clauses are non-finite CPs and there occur relativization and extraposition in the derivation while for Chinese nan/yi constructions,embedded clauses are non-finite TPs and there exists stativization(Jing 2013).From the semantic perspective,the English tough-construction emphasizes ‘the judgment on difficulty or easiness of some event’ while the Chinese nan/yi construction emphasizes ‘some entity possessing a certain property’.