An Approach To Chinese Ba-Construction Within MP Framework

The ba-construction is a basic sentence construction very popular in Modern Chinese, and it is also one of the most challenging topics in the literature of Chinese grammar. This thesis mainly discusses the syntactic structure and generation of Chinese ba-construction. Firstly, we use previous research methods for reference, find out some problems of the studies on ba-construction on the basis of previous achievements; secondly, we analyze all the major elements in ba-construction, and point out the possible categories of them and discuss their syntactic properties; lastly, we reexamine the ba-construction and make a syntactic study on it within the framework of Universal Grammar, especially Minimalist Program.In the literature of the generative grammar, different linguists hold different views about the categorial status of the morpheme ba, the definiteness and original syntactic generative place of the nominal phrase immediately following the morpheme ba, and the complex structure and constrains of the verbal phrase in the ba-construction. Although all the previous standpoints have their own advantages, however, it seems so far that none of these proposals has given us a satisfactory explanation of ba and the ba-construction.Chomsky (1998) proposes that the core functional categories be reduced to C, T and v, and the operations that enter into the computation system be Merge, Agree, and Move. This thesis demonstrates that the morpheme ba can not be v, T or C. If the morpheme ba belongs to any of the CFCs, we can only get the non-ba constructions. Therefore in this thesis we adopt the notion"topic"on the syntactic layer, and propose that the NPb is the secondary topic of the whole sentence, is basically generated from spec-VP, and has specific property in virtue of Radford's (2004) introduction about Luigi Rizzi's Split CP Hypothesis and the distinguishment between focus and topic. This thesis argues that there is another functional category Topic in the ba-construction, and it is spelt out as ba. The morpheme ba occupies spec-TopP. As a functional category, Topic has [EPP] feature and the uninterpretable Topic feature which is the main reason for the generation of ba-construction. The uninterpretable Topic feature attracts the initial NP and the NPb to move up. Because the initial NP is the main topic of the construction, it first moves up to spec-TopP, the [EPP] feature is identified, then the uninterpretable Topic feature attracts the NPb to move up to spec-CP, and the uninterpretable Topic feature agrees with the interpretable features of the NP or DP, and then get erased. Lastly, we get the ba-construction which is very popular in the Mandarin Chinese.The suggestions, proposals and arguments presented in this thesis are tentative and open to criticism and discussion.