Generative Study Of Chinese Control Construction

The term Control is to describe the syntactic phenomena as: a. John tried _ to leave. b. John persuaded Bill _ to leave. c. _ Reading books is fun for John.The element that determines the referent of the non-lexicalized subject of the verbs in non-finite clause is named Controller by Postal (1970) and this kind of sentence pattern is accordingly named Control construction. What is the underlying structure of this construction and how to choose the controller become many linguistic scholars'chief concerns. Among them, Chomsky claims that the null pronominal anaphor PRO is base generated in the underlined position and its controller is mainly up to Minimal Distance Principle (MDP). However, whether PRO exists in Control construction is also far from clear, especially when it comes to the Minimalism period, this problem becomes more obvious and crucial.Under the Minimalist Program (MP) framework, Manzini and Roussou (2000) propose an attraction theory in which PRO is unnecessary. They argue (2000: 403) that"DPs are merged in the place where they surface, and from there they attract a predicate. On this basis, control can simply be construed as the special case in which the same DP attracts more than one predicate. Arbitrary control reduces to the attraction of a predicate by an operator in C."Their theory dispenses with the redundant PRO and provides a unifying account for Obligatory Control and Non-obligatory Control, but it fails to explain the Subject Control of promise-type and Control Shift phenomenon, which are two special cases in Control construction. In order to deal with them properly, this thesis makes a Pseudo-adjunct assumption whose main idea is that when to be allowed is able to be inserted into the sentence, overt or covert, without destroying the grammaticality and meaning of the sentence, promise-type verbs will express commitment-to-permission and persuade-type verbs, request-for-permission, in the meantime, the non-finite clauses following promise-type verbs and persuade-type verbs are considered to be complement and adjunct respectively. The combination of attraction theory and Pseudo-adjunct assumption successfully explain these two cases.The Control construction is very common in Chinese as well, but it is less explored, so the main focus of this thesis is on the explanation of the generative process of Chinese Control through the attraction theory and Pseudo-adjunct assumption.This thesis adopts Li's (2009) statement that Chinese has the distinction between finiteness and non-finiteness, which is an important premise for the analysis, and Chinese Control construction is reflected in four constructions, namely, the pivotal construction, the serial verb construction, the verbal complement construction and the verbal subject construction.After the analysis, the conclusions are roughly shown as follows:Firstly, PRO is not necessary in Chinese Control construction.Secondly, the generative mechanism of normal Chinese Control can be explained by Manzini and Roussou's attraction theory: 1) the pivotal construction belongs to Object Control; 2) the serial verb construction usually has the Subject Control reading, but if the embedded non-finite clause expresses purpose, the sentence will have a Non-obligatory reading; 3) the verbal complement construction usually has a Subject Control reading, but sometimes, they are analyzed as Object Control by referring to Chinese paratactic feature and the ellipsis notion defined by Lǚ(吕叔湘, 1979). In addition, if the embedded clauses are finite, even though the sentences take on the characteristics of verbal complement constructions, they are not Control construction at all; 4) the verbal subject construction has the Non-obligatory Control reading.Thirdly, the explanations of the Subject Control of promise-type and the Control Shift phenomenon in Chinese need the combination of attraction theory and Pseudo-adjunct assumption, but the Pseudo-adjunct assumption should make some fine adjustments when it deals with the criterion of judging the meanings of the promise-type and persuade-type verbs.Fourthly, Chinese Control construction can be explained in the same way as English Control construction, which is a strong evidence of Chomsky's Universal Grammar (UG) assumption.Through this thesis, the generative mechanism of Chinese Control is better understood. However, this thesis leaves a Control phenomenon unexplained, that is, the construction which requires that both subject and object be the controller simultaneously. This problem will be held over for later research.