[Fun]-Hypothesis and EPP-Effects in Chinese Language

This article is an explanatory study of the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) and so-called EPP-effects in the standard Chinese language. We put forward a hypothesis about the nature of the EPP – the [Fun]-hypothesis. According to it, EPP is a selectional feature being privative on functional heads cross-linguistically and is supposed to be checked via merging with content-rich elements. Such a perspective has certain advantages with regard to empirical coverage in accounting for EPP-effects in English. Moreover, it is observed that EPP-effects exist in Chinese within the vP-, TP-, and CP-domains which may provide evidence for the universality of EPP as a UG principle.