A Syntactic Study Of The ’NP1+V_LH+NP2+XP’ Construction In Chinese

This thesis presents a syntactic study on the ‘NP1+VLH+NP2+XP’ construction (VLHhere represents verbs of the love-hate type expressing an emotional attitude such as ai‘love’, xihuan ‘like’, which can enter the frame ‘Subject [+human]+{hen ‘very’+verb}+object’), a special sentence structure in Chinese, in which NP2is consideredby many traditional grammarians both as the object of VLHand the subject of XP, alsotermed jianyu (double functional constituent) construction or pivotal construction (PC)by some others. In addition to the pivotal pattern view, i.e. taking NP2as a doublefunctional constituent in the ‘NP1+VLH+NP2+XP’ construction, some scholars believe[NP2XP] in the ‘NP1+VLH+NP2+XP’ pattern forms a single clause as a wholefunctioning as the direct object of the main verb VLH. Furthermore, there are somescholars arguing that both NP2and XP are objects of the main verb VLH, just as in thedouble object construction. In general, traditional Chinese grammarians concentratemainly on the scope of the construction and the semantic relations within at thedescriptive level.This paper attempts to find out the thematic relation between VLH, NP2and XP aswell as the constituency status of the string [NP2XP] through comparison of thisconstruction with other seemingly similar sentence patterns. In the exploration of theinterpretation and derivation of this construction, for example, wo xihuan ta laoshi ‘Ilike him being honest’, this paper holds that the object of xihuan ‘like’ is not NP2ta‘him’, but the whole string ta laoshi ‘he honest’ which takes a theta-role from the mainverb. Thus NP2ta ‘him’ has no thematic relation with the matrix verb and functions asthe subject of XP forming a predication relation with XP. Within the framework ofgenerative grammar, this thesis explores the internal structure of [NP2XP] andproposes an infinitival complement clause analysis of the post-verb string [NP2XP],arguing that the embedded clause-like element has no independent temporalinterpretation, and based on the basic operations of the minimalist program, a unitary account for the derivation process of the ‘NP1+VLH+NP2+XP’ construction has beensuggested.The proposed analysis provides a tentative account of the interpretation andderivation of the construction in question, and, in addition, this thesis offers evidence ofthe existence of the ECM phenomenon in Chinese and develops several methods oftesting embedded infinitival clauses in Chinese. It is hoped that the observation mayshed light on the analyses of other complex sentences with a verbal complement clauseconstructions in Chinese.