The Diachronic Development of Passive Constructions from Archaic Chinese to Modern Mandarin Yin Li A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2015 Reading Committee: Edith Aldridge, Chair Barbara Citko Zev Handel Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Linguistics © Copyright 2015 Yin Li University of Washington Asbract The Diachronic Development of Passive Constructions from Archaic Chinese to Modern Mandarin Yin Li Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Edith Aldridge, Associate Professor Department of Linguistics In this dissertation, I study the diachronic development of passive construction from Archaic Chinese to Modern Mandarin. I classify the passive forms into two major groups: 1) the monoclausal passive. 2) the biclausal passive. I propose that the monoclausal passive is similar to English-type passive constructions in that they involve a defective passive light verb. This type of passive can be traced back to the JIAN passive in Archaic Chinese. The Middle Chinese agentless BEI passive and Modern Mandarin short passive have the same structure as the JIAN passive. These three constructions can be viewed as three manifestations of a same recurring pattern. The biclausal passive developed from the Archaic Chinese WEI construction, which I analyze as a copula construction. The WEI construction was later reanalyzed as the WEI…SUO passive in Middle Chinese. I propose that the WEI…SUO passive has the same structure as the Modern Mandarin long passive. I propose that the dichotomy of Mandarin Chinese passive constructions can be naturally traced back to their Archaic Chinese sources. Their distinct sources and diachronic developments endowed them with different syntactic properties. They developed independently along two distinct lines. These two distinct lines of development, however, are shown to be governed by the same principles in Minimalist Syntax. Table of Contents Chapter 1 ......................................................................................................................................... 2 1. Goals of the Study ................................................................................................................... 2 2. Framework .............................................................................................................................. 9 2.1 The Phase Theory .............................................................................................................. 9 2.1.1 General architecture .................................................................................................. 10 2.1.2 Merge and Agree....................................................................................................... 11 2.1.3 Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC) ..................................................................... 13 2.1.4 vP phase and CP phase .............................................................................................. 16 2.2 Distributed Morphology .................................................................................................. 19 2.3 Syntactic Reanalysis as Parameter Resetting .................................................................. 21 3. Periodization and Textual information .................................................................................. 26 Chapter 2 ....................................................................................................................................... 32 1. Modern Mandarin long passives ........................................................................................... 34 1.1 DP-movement approach .................................................................................................. 34 1.2 Complementation approach ............................................................................................. 40 1.3 Modified Complementation Approach: vP-shell analysis ............................................... 54 1.3.1 The long passive embeds a non-finite clause ............................................................ 55 1.3.2 No embedded TP layer in Mandarin Chinese long passives ..................................... 62 2. Short passives ........................................................................................................................ 70 2.1 Hashimoto (1987): the deletion of the agent ................................................................... 73 2.2 Shi and Hu (2005): English-type passive analysis .......................................................... 74 2.3 Huang et al. (2009): Control structure for short passives ................................................ 76 2.3 A monoclausal approach to Mandarin Chinese short passives ........................................ 78 3. Overview of the proposal ...................................................................................................... 83 Chapter 3 ....................................................................................................................................... 91 1. The YU Construction ............................................................................................................ 91 1.1 Previous Analysis ............................................................................................................ 92 1.2 The analysis of YU construction in Archaic Chinese ...................................................... 96 i 1.2.1 Structural position of YU .......................................................................................... 96 1.2.2 Two classes of verbs in Archaic Chinese ............................................................... 101 1.2.3 The structure of the YU construction...................................................................... 105 1.3 Passive verbal morphology: interface with historical phonology ................................. 109 2. JIAN Passives ...................................................................................................................... 113 2.1 Previous Analysis .......................................................................................................... 116 2.1.1 Passive Approach .................................................................................................... 117 2.1.2 Transitive Approach................................................................................................ 118 2.2 The structure of JIAN passives ...................................................................................... 123 2.2.1 The distribution of JIAN passives........................................................................... 124 2.2.2 The position of JIAN .............................................................................................. 125 2.3 The source of JIAN passives ......................................................................................... 134 3. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 143 Chapter 4 ..................................................................................................................................... 146 1. The distribution of monoclausal passives in Early Middle Chinese and Middle Chinese .. 148 2. YU constructions and JIAN passives in Middle Chinese ................................................... 152 2.1 The syntactic structure of the YU construction ............................................................. 152 2.2 The syntactic structure of the JIAN passive .................................................................. 155 2.3 The decline of the YU construction in Middle Chinese ................................................ 158 3. The rise of the agentless BEI passive .................................................................................. 166 3.1 BEI in Archaic Chinese ................................................................................................. 166 3.2 BEI in Western Han and Eastern Han Chinese ............................................................. 168 3.3 The syntactic structure of agentless BEI passives ......................................................... 173 3.4 From transitive BEI to passive BEI ............................................................................... 176 4. From JIAN passives to BEI passives .................................................................................. 180 5. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 186 Chapter 5 ..................................................................................................................................... 188 1. The WEI construction in Archaic Chinese .......................................................................... 191 1.1 Literature Review .......................................................................................................... 192 1.1.1 The passive approach .............................................................................................. 192 ii 1.1.2 The copula approach ............................................................................................... 204 1.2 The syntactic structure of the WEI construction ........................................................... 206 1.2.1 The syntactic structure of the WEI construction ....................................................