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Chapter Three Theoretical Framework

3.1 DP Hypothesis

DP Hypothesis is proposed by Abney to analyze syntactic structure of nominal phrases. He holds that head of a nominal phrase is determiner(D) rather than noun(N) (Abney 1987). This view is proposed based on Poss-ing gerundive construction “John’s building a spaceship”. In this special construction, “John’s” seems to be a noun while “building a spaceship” is more like a verb phrase. Therefore, how to figure out head of this construction remains perplexing. In other words, V in VP cannot be the head of an NP. Based on this, Abney thinks D rather than V or N should be the head and postnominal phrase be the complement of D. Hence, DP takes place of NP as syntactic structure of nominal phrase which perfectly solves this problem. Under DP Hypothesis, many elements in traditional NPs get their categories. When nominal phrase is a bare phrase, D is an empty set; when nominal phrase occurs with a determiner, D is the determiner; when nominal phrase occurs with pronouns, D is the pronoun; when nominal phrase occurs with possessive marker, D is the marker. All these elements are regarded as functional categories in DPs. Therefore, DP hypothesis not only helps define categories of elements in nominal phrases but also shows a different hierarchical structure which is scientific and persuasive for that this hierarchy is parallel to hierarchy of CP and avoid the condition that the head of a NP is not a N.

3.2 Phase Theory

Chomsky is the first person who proposed the concept “phase” in his masterpiece Minimalist Program (MP) almost twenty years ago. From his point of view, faculty of language (FL) is a species property in our mind which is treated as “an organ of the body”, taking on cognitive functions (Chomsky 1999). This special organ plays an important role in helping human beings store and compute limited information towards what human beings receive or produce. However, in order to fit for economy and convenience of human brain, Chomsky holds that sentences must be computed step by step, that is to say, derivation of sentences is based on phases which helps reduce derivation burden. Each phase is independent and does not interfere with each other. When a phase is established, it will be transferred immediately without continuing to perform any other computation. Towards phase, he gives the following definition: phases are verbal phases with full argument structure and CP with force indicators but not TP alone or “weak” verbal configurations lacking external arguments (passive, unaccusative). If so, phases are CP and v*P, and a sub array contains exactly one C or v* (Chomsky 1999). Therefore, only v*P and CP are phases for that they are both semantically propositional. What’s more, a phase must also have a feature of agreement syntactically to contribute to feature agreement or arrange a case and a feature of salience phonetically to enter into phonetic processing. These properties are presented in the process of derivation of phase. Phase are computed by two procedures known as Merge and Agree (Chomsky 2004). Merge includes External Merge and Internal Merge. 

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