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Abstract
Due to its impoverished morphology, the inflectional structure of Mandarin Chinese remains an area of Chinese syntax little explored. The purpose of this thesis is to establish what the inflectional structure of Chinese is.
In the recent development of syntactic theory, clauses have been shown to contain Aspect, Tense, agreement and clitic projections (Chomsky 1989, Pollock 1989, and Sportiche 1992, among others), based primarily on evidence from languages with rich inflectional morphology such as English and French. Drawing evidence from the syntactic behavior of the particle suo and the distribution of the quantifier dou, I show that these projections are present in the clausal structure of Chinese and argue that Chinese inflectional structure contains Case projections, NomP (nominative Case projection), SuoP (accusative Case projection), as well as agreement projections, AgrS-P and AgrO-P. Case (nominative and accusative) is assigned to the Specs of the Case projections, while the Specs of agreement projections host small pros at S-structure, thus deriving the different distribution of lexical NP and overt pronouns on the one hand, and small pro on the other. The presence of these projections in Chinese clausal structure has far-reaching consequences for the analyses of various Chinese constructions. Many of the syntactic constructions, such as relatives, bei-constructions (the so-called 'passives') and Topicalization, are shown to involve a left-dislocated structure. In addition, relatives and bei-sentences have the option of a structure involving movement of a null-operator to (Spec, CP) and a position adjoined to NomP, respectively. This is an instance of syntactic wh-movement, thus providing evidence contrary to a widely held view that Chinese does have wh-movement at S-structure. I also argue that Chinese clausal structure contains a focus projection (ShiP) and that the focus interpretation is derived from movement of the focused elements to (Spec, ShiP) at LF.