The syntax of focus and topic in Mandarin Chinese

… the Left Periphery: The Cartography of …, 2011

Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2008

The purpose of this study is two-fold. First, it argues that "fine structure of the left periphery" can be applied to the sentence-internal domain in Chinese (i.e., between TP and vP) and that this domain can license both Topic and Focus under distinct functional projections, with TopicP dominating FocusP. The result of this paper supports claims in Bellettis Paul about functional projections in the lower INFL domain, and shows that an analysis of single projection proposed by Lambova for Topic and Focus in Bulgarian cannot carry over to Chinese data. Second, by taking this joint approach of syntax and information structure, different from previous analyses, I argue that preposed objects can be either Topic or Focus in the sentence-internal domain. The present study in turn shows that the so-called verb-copying sentences in Chinese can be analyzed on a par with the pre-posed object construction. A unified account to the pre-posed object construction and the so-called verb-copying sentences is provided.

Lingua, 1991

* This paper is a revised version of portions of chapter 2 of my dissertation, written at the University of Hawaii. I am grateful for the support of ECS, Inc. Also, I would like to thank Drs.

… of the West Coast Conference on …, 1988

Taking the Cartographic Approach, I argue that the left periphery of nominals in Mandarin (i.e., the domain before demonstrative) has properties similar to the split-CP domain proposed by . In addition, I argue that the nominal internal domain (i.e., under demonstrative but outside of NP) encodes information structure in a way similar to the sentence-internal Topic and Focus that has been put forth in the literature. In this paper, I show that identifying Topic and Focus within a nominal at such two distinct domains helps to explain various so-called "reordering" and extraction phenomena affecting nominal elements, their interpretation, and their associated discourse functions. The result of this paper supports the parallelisms between noun phrases and clauses and it provides a new perspective to evaluate such theoretical implication, that is, the interaction between syntax and information structure.

Language and Linguistics, 2001

This paper proposes a uniform movement approach to bare O-M (object movement) and lian-focalization (e.g. Shyu 1995), and articulates a [+Focus] feature motivated substitution mechanism. The movement is well-motivated under Chomsky's (1993) Economy Principle and Poole's (1996) execution of Form Chain, instead of being triggered by Case-related agreement. This paper further demonstrates how considering different types of predicates helps clarify the nature of the discourse topic, emphatic topic, and focus. Moreover, the comparison of the O-M in Chinese with that in other languages shows that Chinese O-M is not identical to the VP-peripheral scrambling in Japanese, and it also is different from the O-M found in languages that are motivated by overt Case-checking/overt verb movement, e.g. the Icelandic language. The proposed A-chain focalization lends further support to the existence of A-chain focalization. Ultimately, the result of this study lends further support to the non-unitary focusing devices both within a single language and among languages.

2017

The syntax and the function of Chinese relative clauses have been a hot issue in linguistic studies, given that typologically modifiers of nominals rarely occur before a demonstrative (cf. Greenberg 1963, Cinque 2005), and yet pre-demonstrative relative clauses are common in Chinese. This paper presents an analysis of syntax and information structure of Chinese relative clauses and shows results of a corpus study and a production experiment. It is argued that pre-demonstrative relative clauses structurally express Focus at the nominal periphery, similar to Focus Phrase at the left-periphery of a sentence à la Rizzi (1997), deriving by nominalinternal Focus movement. The result of this paper proves the claim of the nominal-clausal parallelism (Abney 1987; Chomsky 1970; Giusti 1996, 2006; Aboh 2004) and the edge (phase) property of DP (Citko 2014) with Chinese data, and shows that features of information structure have syntactic and interpretive effects, suggesting that such features ...

Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 2001

In a group of genetically unrelated and otherwise fully regular head-initial SVO languages a particular modal verb is consistently found to occur in predicate-final position, posing a strong empirical challenge to the Universal Base Hypothesis argued for in Cinque (1999). Detailed investigation indicates that the surface forms are however derived from fully regular underlying structures via a process of focus-driven light predicate raising. Cross-linguistic variation in the paradigm then shows that the basic modal structure is currently in different stages of development in the languages investigated. In Cantonese in particular it is argued that the trigger for VP-raising has now become fully fossilized and no longer reflects its original motivation. The paper concludes that certain movement operations may in general occur without any clearly understandable synchronic trigger. Formally, Chomsky's 'strong categorial/ EPP features' are suggested to correspond precisely to this type of movement whose original motivation has weakened and become hidden during the course of language change.

The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 11, 2015

Our goal in this paper is to analyze the even-construction in Mandarin Chinese and Italian and the preposed object in the low periphery of Mandarin Chinese. In the first part of the paper, we shall see that the even-construction can play two roles: focus and topic. Although in both cases their semantics stay fundamentally the same, their syntax is crucially different. We shall see that when an even-phrase occurs in sentence-initial position, it is a topic construction; while when it occurs sentence-internally, it is a focus construction. In the second part of the paper, we study the nature of the preposed object in the low periphery of Mandarin. Contrary to the traditional analysis that considers it as a focus item (Ernst and Wang 1995; Shyu 1995, 2001, Zhang 1996, among others), we argue that the preposed object is a Contrastive Topic (i.e., a syntactic topic that gets contrastive stress). We also discuss the fact that the even-construction and the preposed object within the low periphery differ from the elements in the high periphery because they are dislocated via A-movement. Our investigation points to notions of the rules of topic and focus that are more fine-grained than what was traditionally thought. Specifically, we maintain that while the domain of topic has specific syntactic features, its semantics doesn't always have to pertain to old information. We shall also identify interesting differences between the projections in the high periphery versus those in the low periphery. 1 [ 34 ] Cartography of Chinese Syntax [ 36 ] Cartography of Chinese Syntax (8) ??Lian Xiaoyu j , Zhangsan i a, t i dou piping le t j. even Xiaoyu Zhangsan top all criticize fp 'Even Xiaoyu, as for Zhangsan, he didn't criticize.' (9) Hua, lian meiguihua j , t j dou hen pianyi. Flowers even roses all very cheap 'As for flowers, even roses are cheap.' (10) *Lian meiguihua j , hua, t j dou hen pianyi. Even roses flowers all very cheap (11) Gei Xiaoyu, lian na ben hen gui de shu i , To Xiaoyu even that cl very expensive de book, Lisi dou mai le t i. Lisi all buy fp 'For Xiaoyu, even that expensive book, Lisi bought.' (12) *Lian na ben hen gui de shu i , gei Xiaoyu, Lisi even that cl very expensive de book to Xiaoyu Lisi dou mai le t i. all buy fp (13) Zhangsan i , wo gei [na ge shazi] i ji le Zhangsan I to that cl imbecile send asp yi feng xin! one cl letter 'Zhangsan, I sent a letter to that imbecile!' (14) *Wo gei [na ge shazi] i Zhangsan i , ji le yi I to that cl imbecile Zhangsan send asp one feng xin! cl letter When different kinds of topics co-occur, their relative order is fixed. The highest position is occupied by the Aboutness Topic, followed by the Hanging Topic and the Left Dislocaton is in the lowest part in the 'Topic Field' 2 (Badan and Del Gobbo 2010). The lian-XP in sentence initial position occupies always the lowest position of the whole CP, that is it has to be always to the right of all the topics. 2.2. Perfino: Grammatical Outline As lian, perfino can introduce various types of phrases: DP, PP, VP, CP, and time adverbs (see section 2.3). However, it should be noticed that perfino is more frequently found as a DP modifier, differently from the other Focus OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF-FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Mar 23 2015, NEWGEN 9780190241694_Tsai_The Cartography of Chinese Syntax.indb 36 3/23/2015 2:00:31 PM (20) a. *Zhangsan zhe ben shu dou lian kanwan le. Zhangsan this cl book all even read fp b. *Zhangsan lian kanwan zhe ben shu. Zhangsan even read this cl book c. *Zhangsan dou kanwan zhe ben shu. Zhangsan all read this cl book Lian and perfino can introduce various types of phrases, which are considered to be the different domains of the particles DP (as in (21)), PP (22), VP (23), and adverbs (24):