A Comparative Study Of The Syntax Of English And Chinese Small Clauses

Small clause has become one of the most important issues in the field of linguistics since the1980s. Nowadays there are lots of linguists at home and abroad who devote themselves to studying English small clauses or Chinese small clauses. However, few of them have tried to compare these two kinds of small clauses from a syntactic perspective and to find their similarities and differences.In consideration of the above, this thesis attempts to find the similarities and differences between English and Chinese small clauses by discussing their notions and classifications at the very beginning. We find that both English and Chinese small clauses not only can be defined as grammar categories with subject-predicate relation but lacks inflection, but also can be divided into the following four types according to different predicates of small clauses, namely adjectival small clauses, prepositional small clauses, nominal small clauses, and verbal small clauses. We also find that a Chinese small clause is a dynamic grammatical unit of the Chinese language, which is composed of meaningful words or phrases and certain intonations. An English small clause, however, is a static unit, only consisting of a subject and a predicate, which excludes intonation from its constituents.The syntactic structure of small clause is still a controversial topic. Different scholars have different analysis about this controversial topic, such as Stowell’s XP analysis, Radford’s and Rothstein’s SC analysis, Aarts’s and Culicover’s IP analysis, Nasser’s TP analysis and so on. We finally find that the IP analysis can be feasible for both the English and Chinese small clauses’syntactic categories. Based on the previous studies, this thesis analyzes both English and Chinese small clauses as a maximal projection headed by a defective inflection named I in the light of IP analysis proposed by Culicover.In order to analyze the derivation of small clauses, the theories of Theta, X-bar, Case, VP Shell, and VP-internal Subject Hypothesis have been adopted. According to Theta Theory, the thesis argues that a complement small clause gets the Theme theta-role assigned by the matrix verb as a unit, and the subject of a small clause gets a theta-role assigned by its predicate. On the basis of VP-internal subject hypothesis and the principle that predicate theta-marks its subject, the thesis points out that the subject of a small clause originates in the specifier position of XP to gain a theta-role assigned by XP and then moves to the specifier position of IP or IP for the sake of case.Afterwards, we analyze in detail the derivational process of English and Chinese small clauses that distribute in different constructions, such as ECM construction, SVOC construction, raising construction, and double object construction. English and Chinese small clauses have similar (or even the same) derivational process in most cases.But in SVOC construction, there is a little difference. For Chinese small clause, its predicate merges with the matrix verb to form a compound verb, which functions as a unit in the whole sentence. Even though, the IP analysis can still work for their derivation in resultant and depictive constructions.This thesis attempts to find out the similarities and differences of English and Chinese small clauses by discussing their notions, grammar categories and derivational processes. It then shows that languages share fundamental structural properties, which confirms that Chomsky’s generative grammar is a universal grammar.