Revisit To The Issues Regarding Chinese-specific Bei Passives In The Framework Of Principles And Parameters Theory

The past few decades have seen a long journey in the research of derivations of Chinese passives. Though many attempts have been made, some gaps still remain surprisingly idle in this field. The present study is designed to probe into three controversially-discussed issues related to Chinese-specific passives. The first concern goes to the categorial feature of Bei in Chinese passives. The second issue has to do with retained-object passives. And the third one is related to resumptive-pronoun passives.To begin with, a working definition is given to the Chinese passives and the characteristics of Chinese passives are generalized. These two efforts pave the way for an in-depth investigation of three issues concerned in the ensuing chapters.First is a revisit to Bei's categorial feature. Different from viewing Bei as a preposition, a verb, an auxiliary verb, we presuppose Bei as the functional category with phonetic content. In other words, it is one of the variations of light verb in Chinese. It is characterized as carrying the strong [+passive] features, thus requiring a NP to occupy the [Spec,IP] position for the feature checking.Second is another attempt on retained-object passives. A series of problems such as the case assignment of retained object, the motivation of possessor NP and syntactic status of de remains unexplained. In light of this, the present study proposes a new model which combines the revised Thematic Hierarchy Theory and MI under P&P theory as another alternative to the derivation of RO passives. The advantage over the traditional attempts lies in the fact that this approach is hopefully able to cover all types of RO passives in the unified framework so that unnecessary controversies can be avoided. In the context of this combined model, it is proposed that:i. Semantically synonymous sentences are not necessarily structurally cognate.ii. Arguments in the lexical subarray, or one syntactic object ("phase"), have been presupposed to be assigned theθ-roles.iii. The hierarchical way in whichθ-roles are distributed to the arguments determines the sequence in which the Merge is operated,iv. The phase-by-phase analysis is employed to the derivation of RO passives. It aims to present a fresh perspective on the automatic processing of computational language in the "least effort" way.The third issue concerns the resumptive-pronoun passives. RP's access to passives is realized under some conditions. Three findings are given in this thesis. First, RP becomes phonologically overt in passives with the presence of objective marker Ba. Second, the use of RP in Chinese Bei passives is obligatorily in tandem with an agentive NP. Third, affectee marker Gei, coupled with resumptive pronoun, makes it more prominent that the subject is affected by adversity or unpleasant experience, which is specific in Chinese passives.