| English Poss-ing construction, PC for short, is a linguistic structure composed of possessive (genitive case marked NP or possessive pronoun) and V-ing construction, e.g. Brown's/his deftly painting his daughter. It is traditionally known as a subtype of gerundive structures and shows a mixture of nominal and verbal properties. Specifically speaking, PC behaves like noun phrase in terms of its syntactic distribution (e.g. taking subject, VP-complement, and PP-complement positions etc.), and exemplifies verbal properties like that of verb phrase as far as its internal structure is concerned (e.g. V-ing taking accusative NP complement and being modified by adverbs, etc.). For its dual properties, PC has long been one of the most perplexing phenomena in linguistic research.To provide a reasonable explanation for the mixed properties of PC, linguists of different stances (Lees, 1960; Chomsky, 1970; Abney, 1987; Pullum, 1991; Malouf, 1998, etc.) put forward various hypotheses, some of which are strongly opposed to each other in nature and on theoretical basis. Despite the great differences in their technical details, all of them are meaningful and respectable attempts to arrive at the unique properties of PC and thus have immensely enriched our understanding of this structure. Nevertheless, for one reason or other, be it theoretically or empirically, many of them fail to capture the whole picture of PC and fall short of the explanatory adequacy of a receivable model. Therefore, a rethinking of PC in syntax is necessary and a solution of maximal generalization and explanatory power is greatly in demand.This thesis, with an aim to account for the unique properties of PC without the addition of otherwise unmotivated elements or mechanism, is an attempt to argue for the hypothesis that English Poss-ing construction is in fact NP~+ headed by a noun-like element Nom. In line with this, 1) Nom is a result of nominalization at syntactic level rather than one in the lexicon; 2) -ing in PC is an overt representation of nominalizer whose function is to syntactically nominalize an XP as Nom; 3) The nominalization of PC is syntactically triggered by the strong feature [+N] of the Nominal Phrase position (NP) in the basic frame of sentential structure. By way of this, the nominal properties of PC are accounted for by the [+N] feature of the positions a PC is to take, and its verbal properties are addressed by the subcategorial information of the lexical head V whose categorical features (adverbial modifiers, accusative complement, etc.) are preserved along the way of VP projection.With a basis on a combination of top-down and bottom-up perspectives in addressing the hybrid propertied of PC, a (nearly) minimalist analysis of the derivational process of PC is carefully exemplified. It is proved that the different locations (VP, VP+, ASPP) of nominalization in the derivation of PC will put out different specific structures such as Brown's painting his wife, Brown's deftly painting his wife, Brown's having painted his wife, Brown's having been painting his wife, etc. |
