Some Issues On English And Chinese Small Clause In Minimalist Program

Since Chomsky and Stowell (1981) proposed the term Small Clause, manylinguists from home and abroad have paid their attention on the research of this specialcategory. However, though a lot of progress has been made on the study of thislinguistic problem, no unified satisfactory explanation has been provided.This thesis studies this controversial syntactic category in linguistic field—SmallClause. It tries to redefine the notion, categorial status as well as to give a reasonableexplanation for the derivation of both English and Chinese Small Clauses under theframework of Minimalist Program. It aims to provide a unified and comprehensiveexplanation for both English and Chinese Small Clauses.At the beginning, this thesis introduced former studies from home and abroad onChinese and English Small Clauses briefly. And in order to investigate the derivation ofSmall Clauses systematically and completely, this paper has adopted the X-bar Theory,Theta-Theory, Case Theory, VP-internal Subject Hypothesis and VP Shell in accordingto the Minimalist Program. Simply speaking, a Small Clause is a sentential constituentwhose structure is <NP, XP> and X could belong to category N, A, P, V in this thesis.Besides, in view of the categorial status of Small Clauses, different linguists holddifferent opinions, among which, some representative ones are XP Analysis, PrPAnalysis, AgrP Analysis, SC Analysis, TP Analysis and IP Analysis. This paper hasdiscussed both the advantages and disadvantages of the above analyses respectively, andthen based on Aarts’ and Culicover’s IP analysis, this paper regards a Small Clause as amaximal projection headed by a defected functional inflection I. And we could find thedistribution of Small Clauses in ECM Structure, SVOC Structure, Raising Structure andExistential Structure in English as well as in Chinese. The Small Clause has somespecial syntactic features: there is an argument and predicate relationship existingwithin it; and three types of subject could appear in Small Clauses, that is, a lexical NP,a null PRO subject and a trace t; a Small Clause lacks a complementizer and its head I isdefected with a null case. Further, this thesis discusses the derivation process ondifferent types of Small Clauses: the Adjectival Small Clauses, Nominal Small Clauses, Verbal Small Clauses and Prepositional Small Clauses in ECM Structure; theResultatives and Depictives in SVOC Structure; the Small Clauses in Raising Structureand Existential Structure. On accordance with the VP-internal Subject Hypothesis andthe Theta-Theory, this paper considers the subject of a Small Clause originates in thespecifier position of XP to be assigned its theta-role, then moves which is driven by thecase filter.