The Minimalist Program And Word Order In Chinese

It has been a long time that the word order of Chinese syntax gained much attention for its diversity. It is difficult for the linguists to agree on which is the basic or underlying word order in Chinese. Traditional linguists have classified Chinese as Subject-Verb-Object(SVO),but more recent discussions have argued that Chinese has a basic SOV word order.In order to capture the real character of a language,we have to look deeply into the syntactic facts of that language.Since the study of syntax in a language is closely related to the basic word order of that language,we have to know the basic word order in Chinese first.Once this word order is empirically and theoretically established,we can use more generalized theories,like Minimalist Program to explain how it comes about.In this thesis,the author attempts to clarify the basic syntactic facts in Chinese within the framework of the Minimalist Program.The widespread claim that Chinese is an SOV language to me is doubtful.I believe that modern Chinese is an SVO language,which will be justified in chapter three.Since many linguists use Ba-construction as the evidence that Chinese is an SOV language,in this study,the issue of Ba-construction and the history of Ba-construction are clarified.It's found that Ba-constructions are also generated from the basic word order SVO within the framework of the Minimalist Program.The Ba-construction is only the example which contains the light verb Ba(把).On this theoretical basis,it's concluded that it is inappropriate to use Ba-construction as evidence to argue that Chinese is an SOV language.This conclusion is also supported by evidence from other studies,for example,child language acquisition and data from historical linguists.At the same time,all the OV or SOV order types are marked structures in Mandarin Chinese in the sense that they transpose the object to the front of the verb for certain pragmatic purposes,such as emphasis or topic functions.Within the frame work of the Minimalist Program,a syntactic structure is put forward which supposes that almost all the Chinese word orders contain a light verb which can be omitted sometimes. This structure can explain most grammatical phenomena in Chinese.