A Minimalist Approach To The Derivation Of Small Clauses

Within the framework of Minimalist Program(Chomsky 2000, 2001,2005,2006),this thesis gives an analysis regarding the categorial status of the subcategorized small clause node and the syntactic derivation of English and Chinese small clauses in different structures.It begins with a brief discussion of the notion of English and Chinese small Clauses and defines a small clause as a constituent with subject and predicate relation but lacks complementizers and inflection.Then the thesis argues against some proposed approaches to the categorial status of the small clause node such as XP analysis,IP analysis,PrP analysis, AgrP analysis and small clause(SC) analysis.We arrive at the conclusion that a small clause constituent is the maximal projection of abstract functional head anaphor T based on the TP analysis of Nasser (2007).At last,we improve Nasser's TP analysis and adopt it to analyze the syntactic derivation of English and Chinese small clauses in different structures such as Exceptional Case Marking(ECM) structure,SVOC structure,and raising structure.The thesis aims to give a unified and reasonable explanation for the syntactic derivation of English and Chinese small clauses and prove the explanation power and generalization of Minimalist Program.In order to explain the derivation of small clauses,the theories of Theta,Case,Features,Merging and the Operation Agree(Chomsky 1981, 2000,2001),Multiple Agree(Hiraiwa 2001) and Feature Inheritance (Chomsky 2005,2006) have been adopted.According to Theta Theory, this thesis argues that a complement small clause as a unit gets the Theme theta-role assigned by the matrix verb.The predicate of a small clause assigns a theta-role to its subject.Different from the view of Nasser(2007),we argue that the verbal,adjectival and prepositional predicates of small clauses do not need Case checking since the main part of Case Theory is to explain how nouns get the abstract Case. Moreover,the predicate noun of a small clause does not get any theta-role,and it does not need the Case either.According to the Split-T Hypothesis(Landau 2004),this thesis claims that T in the main clause is non-anaphor T and the T in the small clause is anaphor T.The anaphor T is c-commanded by its antecedent non-anaphor T.The understood tense of a small clause depends on the semantics of the tense of the main clause.In light of the Features,Merging and the Operation Agree Theory (Chomsky 2000,2001) and the Multiple Agree Theory(Hiraiwa 2001), the anaphor T in a small clause is the Probe,which can simultaneously match two Goals,i.e.the subject and predicate of a small clause.The anaphor T in a complement small clause inherits the accusative Case feature and the uninterpretableφ-features(person,number,gender) from v^*1.With respect to VP-intemal subject hypothesis and the principle that predicate theta-marks its subject,the thesis maintains that the subject of a small clause originates within predication,and then moves to[Spec,TP] to check the Extended Projection Principle(EPP) feature.The revised TP analysis may be adopted to account for the syntactic derivation of Chinese and English small clauses in typical structures such as ECM structure,SVOC structure and raising structure in a unified and successful way.Meanwhile,it can solve some problems faced by other analyses.During the nominal small clauses analysis in ECM structure, we find a special kind of nouns which need neither theta-role nor Case, i.e.the predicate nouns.When we analyze the resultative SVOC structure, we find that there is no need for all parts of a small clause to move out and get the tense explanation as the former researchers claim.The small clause itself is a TP projection,and it can get the same tense as the main clause within its own domain.The anaphor T can be realized as the affix aspect auxiliary le in Chinese resultative structures.In the English and Chinese raising structure analysis,we maintain that the complement of a raising predicate is a small clause.The original subject of a small clause is raised to become the subject of the main clause,leaving the trace t as the subject of the small clause.TP analysis is more accordant with the Economy Principle in Minimalist Program.