Abstract
The body of this thesis is divided into two parts. The first part deals with subjunctive mood in Mandarin Chinese, whereby the environments in which subjunctive complement clauses occur are testified in indirect ways and are found to fall in a few categories. In addition, I examine how the complement clauses of desiderative predicates interact with aspects and modals. If we adopt Smith’s (1991) insight on grammatical aspects and lexical aspects, Mandarin allows only lexical aspects in a subjunctive complement clause. Moreover, if we view subjunctive complement clauses from a modality perspective, only deontic modality can occur in a subjunctive environment. I call it a desiderative-deontic effect. The second part tackles the main clause phenomenon (henceforth the MCP). Haegeman (2006a, 2010, 2011, 2012a, 2012b) (and some references therein) mentions that the behavior of subordinate clauses is different from root clauses. Main clauses seem to have some privilege in that a handful of syntactic patterns, such as topicalization, do not appear in subordinate clauses. She observes that there is a double asymmetry between English and Romance languages. In English, adjuncts can front to the left of adverbial clauses, while arguments cannot; clitic left dislocation (henceforth CLLD) in Romance languages is admitted in the left periphery of adverbial clauses. Based on Haegeman’s ideas, I investigate whether the length of some clause types in Mandarin is truncated and whether there is a distinction between central and peripheral adverbial clauses in the sense of Haegeman (2012a, 2012b). Moreover, I adopt the cartographic approach (Rizzi 1997, 2004; Cinque 1999) to show the structure of root and subordinate clauses in Chinese.