Aspects of Chinese syntax: Ergativity and phrase structure

This thesis is a study of various aspects of Chinese syntax, from a government-and binding perspective, arguing that a range of grammatical problems of Chinese syntax such as the variable position of subject, word order variation, locative inversion, definiteness effects, quantification and scope effects of inverted subjects can be explained if it is recognized that Chinese has both unergative (accusative) and ergative-type structures.Chapter One argues for a unified theory of grammatical mapping between the argument structure and syntactic structure, which accounts for a comprehensive range of ergative phenomena across languages. Chapter Two provides arguments for taking contrastive word order in Chinese as the primary syntactic diagnostics for ergativity in this language and explores the unergative-ergative alternations with regard to word order variations. Chapter Three explores the range of ergativity in Chinese in phrasal syntax, with emphasis on the displaced subject and locative inversion construction. It argues for a type-oriented approach to ergativity across languages. Chapter Four examines the syntactic nature of complex predicates in Mandarin and the ergative phenomena on the word level, focusing on the headedness condition of causative verb compound predicates as well as the thematic structure of such predicates.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio