A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Left Edge Structures

The author aims to analyze the syntactic representation characteristics and structure of left periphery in English and Chinese structures respectively under the guidance of Transformational Generative Grammar.By analyzing the relative phenomenon of left periphery in both Chinese and English,the research goal of the paper is to find out the interior structural dissimilarities of the two languages.And at the same time,the author hopes that this research can make a contribution to further research of this field.In the first part of the thesis,the author gives a detailed analysis of the left periphery of English and Chinese respectively.Initially,the force mechanism "shi"structure will be studied.Then the syntactic limitations and syntactic distribution will be analyzed on the bases of the structures of English and Chinese.On the basis of Rizzi’s CP-split theory,the author adopts Rizzi’s proposition of the distribution of Chinese force mechanism,that is:[TopP...[FocP...[IP...[VP...]]]].In addition,the focus marker "shi",driven by the[+F]feature,moves from its original place to the domain of FocP.In the second part,the author studies left periphery in both English and Chinese syntactic structures.And,there are cross-linguistic dissimilarities in syntactic structures of interrogatives.In this thesis,the study of left periphery,in the principle-parameter framework,will try to answer the following questions:the first question is,what are the parameters of English and Chinese interrogatives?The second one is what constituents carry these features?The last question is to find out the status of these parameters in the structures left periphery in both Chinese and English.In the conclusion part,the author asserts the wide application of principle-parameter in the study of left periphery in both English and Chinese.Moreover,on the basis of comparative study of left periphery between English and Chinese,the author gets the different parameters of the two languages.That is English wh-movement is overt,but the wh-fronting in Chinese is covert,which indicates that wh-fronting in both Chinese and English is realized by movement.