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CHAPTER ONE   GENERAL INTRODUCTION 

This  chapter  consists  of  three  sections.  Section  1.1  gives  examples  of  different patterns  of  bei  constructions  and  identify  our  main  research  targets.  Section  1.2 discusses  some  remaining  issues  concerning  the  bei  construction  and  poses  two research  questions  to  be  dealt  with  in  this  thesis.  The  organization  of  this  thesis  is laid out in section 1.3.

1.1   An overview of the bei construction 
The  bei  construction  refers  to  sentences  containing  the  morpheme  bei  and  is  often regarded as a canonical passive construction in Mandarin (Ting 1998).   Sentence  (1)  and  (2)  are  canonical  bei  constructions  in  modern  Mandarin,  in which  a  gap  is  found  in  the  main  verb  ‘da’.  In  most  cases,  the  pre-bei  NP  is interpreted as the Patient and the post-bei NP as the Agent.  In  the  literature,  sentence  (1)  is  called  the  long  passive  with  an  overt  Agent immediately  after  bei  and  sentence  (2)  the short  passive  without  an  overt  Agent.  A canonical bei construction usually takes the following structure: NP1 bei (NP2) VP. However, there are instances where the object position is filled with an NP and the subject is most often interpreted as the possessor of the object NP.  This type of bei  construction  is  referred  to  as  the  bei  construction  with  a  retained  object  by  Xu (1999),  while  Lin  (2009)  refers  to  it  as  gapless  bei  construction.  In  this  thesis,  the former term will be adopted. Examples of this pattern are given in (3) and (4). 
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1.2   Research Questions 
To recapitulate, this thesis aims to answer the following two research questions:  (7)   a.  Is  a  uniform  analysis  of  the  bei  construction  feasible?  To  put  it  more specifically,  do  the  long  passive  and  the  short  passive  share  similar  syntactic properties? Is the short passive an Agent-deletion version of the long passive? b.  What  syntactic  mechanisms  are  involved  in  the  derivation  of  the  bei construction?  To  put  it  more  specifically,  what  is  the  syntactic  status  of  bei?  How can  we  explain  the  fact  that  only  transitive  verbs  can  be  selected  by  bei?  How  the DPs in the bei construction are assigned cases?  Question  (7a)  will  be  inv本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。