Key Functional Categories And Their Syntactic Properties

The major focus of this dissertation is to explore four functional categories and their syntactic properties with special reference to Chinese under the MP framework. They are, as I term,'Key Functional Categories', for all of them have played an important role in shaping the syntactic configuration of a particular language as well as determining the parametric variations across different languages.Among the four categories, T, C and v* are members of the'Core Functional Categories'that Chomsky has proposed in his recent work Minimalist Inquiry (1998): T (Tense/event structure), C (expressing force/mood), v* (the'light verb'head of transitive constructions). As for the light verb'v', it is a transitive feature composite inherent of any verbal element, and as I would argue in the chapter concerned, it is a key functional category for it plays an important role in case assignment and determines the type of verb it lies in.Having established the concept that TP is universally projected a category, I set to study the syntactic status of the EC (Empty Category) in the so called wuzhu ju ('subjectless sentences') in Chinese, additional proof consequently yielded in support of Chomsky's claim that the uninterpretable EPP feature andφ-features are universal characteristics of T, and I have also made some fine adaptations to Chomsky's argument on the subject formation to that end. When discussing C and its syntactic properties, I primarily focus on the syntactic differences between Chinese and English in the configuration of interrogative sentences. By examining the idiosyncratic characteristics of Chinese question words and sentence final particles, I am able to account for the syntactic properties of Chinese interrogative constructions from a minimalist perspective. As for light verbs'v*'and'v', they are pivotal to the formation of a syntactic configuration on different grounds. By identifying Chinese as an [+OS] (Object Shift) language, many related syntactic issues concerning the Chinese language can be accounted for in the minimalist terms, while a thorough investigation of the syntactic characteristics of the light verb'v'has offered us an enlightening perspective on the minimalist studies of some typical Chinese sentence structures like the gei-construction and the bei-construction.