A Comparative Study on Pro-drop and Non-pro-drop Language-Taking Chi-nese (Pro-drop Language) and English (Non-pro-drop Language) as the Example

摘要

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, Chi-nese, etc. The latter consists of English, French, etc. whose subjects cannot be omitted. Through a comparative study, taking Chi-nese and English as the examples, this paper aims to disclose the differences between pro-drop language and non pro-drop lan-guage.