A Contrastive Study On The Syntax Of English And Chinese ECM Constructions Under The Framework Of Phase Theory

Based on the existing research,this thesis compares the syntactic properties,classification,and derivational processes of the English and Chinese Exceptional Case Marking Constructions(ECM constructions).Not only are the similarities and differences of the derivational process explored,but also the reasons can be explained why Chinese does not have the type of ECM constructions with infinitive clauses as complements.The current study found that,the identical syntactic characteristics of the English and Chinese ECM constructions are that they both have ECM verbs as markers and their complements can only be defective clauses.The disparity in syntactic characteristics is that the Chinese ECM structure can have two or more predicates,while the English ECM structure can only have one predicate,and thus the predicate capacity of the Chinese ECM structure is greater than that in English.The classifications of the English and Chinese ECM constructions are that both English and Chinese have ECM constructions with small clauses as complements,but ECM constructions with infinitives as complements only exist in English.The derivational processes of these three types of ECM constructions with adjectival,nominal,and prepositional small clauses as complements are the same.The subject and the predicate in a small clause establish a predicate agreement relationship,forming the phase RP.The phase head R is a pure relator without any grammatical meaning.The subject of the small clause is located at the edge of the phase RP and has no Case.According to the Phase Impenetrable Condition Theory,the subject of the small clause can be probed by the predicate V and obtain an Accusative Case.The syntactic derivation of the ECM constructions with the verbal small clause as complements is inconsistent between English and Chinese.The phase head R in the English verbal clause has the affix feature,and therefore moves to VP and causes the extension of phase VP.In the extended VP is included the RP.And the subject of the verbal small clause is no longer at the edge of the phase,so it cannot enter further derivations.In contrast,Chinese has no affix feature.Thus,R is a pure relator in all types of ECM constructions with a small clause as a complement and will not cause phase expansion.As a result,the English ECM constructions with the verbal small clause as a complement cannot extract the embedded clause subject to form a passive form,while the Chinese can.The derivational process of the English ECM constructions with the infinitives as complements is that the DP generates in Spec-IP,but the infinitive to has the [-tense] feature and no Case-assignment ability,so the verb V probes and values the active goal DP,and the DP moves to the Spec-v*P and leaves a copy.The reasons for the syntactic similarities of English and Chinese ECM constructions are the same syntactic categories of ECM verbs and complements,and R has the same characteristics in the English and Chinese ECM constructions with adjectival,nominal,and prepositional small clauses as complements.The reasons for the syntactic difference between English and Chinese are the different language types and the syntactic marks.English is the hypotaxis language that relies on a strict syntactic structure for sentence combination,while the Chinese language is the parataxis language,depending on the semantics or context.And English syntactic marks present as the morphological changes of verbs under the affix approach,whereas the Chinese syntactic marks mostly use the lexical approach and do not have the morphological changes.Based on the Phase Theory,this thesis compares the syntactic properties,classification,and derivational processes of English and Chinese ECM constructions and explores the reasons for their similarities and differences.This thesis further illustrates the strong explanatory capability of generative grammar.