In Chomsky's Government and Binding theory, null subject is a kind of Empty Category, namely"pro". Whether subject can be empty constitutes an important parameter of universal grammar, called pro-drop Pa...In Chomsky's Government and Binding theory, null subject is a kind of Empty Category, namely"pro". Whether subject can be empty constitutes an important parameter of universal grammar, called pro-drop Parameter which is often used to indicate the syntactic difference in human language. According to that, Chomsky divides human language into two categories:pro-drop language and non pro-drop language. The former one allows the loss of the subject, stood for by Italian, Spanish, Chinese, etc. The latter consists of English, French, etc. whose subjects cannot be omitted. Through a comparative study, taking Chinese and English as the examples, this paper aims to disclose the differences between pro-drop language and non pro-drop language.展开更多
文摘In Chomsky's Government and Binding theory, null subject is a kind of Empty Category, namely"pro". Whether subject can be empty constitutes an important parameter of universal grammar, called pro-drop Parameter which is often used to indicate the syntactic difference in human language. According to that, Chomsky divides human language into two categories:pro-drop language and non pro-drop language. The former one allows the loss of the subject, stood for by Italian, Spanish, Chinese, etc. The latter consists of English, French, etc. whose subjects cannot be omitted. Through a comparative study, taking Chinese and English as the examples, this paper aims to disclose the differences between pro-drop language and non pro-drop language.
