SUBORDINATE GAPS IN MANDARIN CHINESE

The existence of subordinate gaps in Mandarin Chinese casts doubt on analyses built on canonical coordinate gapping. We observe that the minimality of contrastive focus and the type of subordinate clause determine the acceptability of a missing gap in subordinate structure. Along this vein, we propose that a semantic-based deletion account can be used to interpret gapping in Mandarin. Such account relies on two violable constraints, AvoidF and Focus condition on gapping (Schwarzchild 1999, Merchant 2001) to compute the acceptability of a gap

Issues on topics

The present volume contains papers that bear mainly on issues concerning the topic concept. This concept is of course very broad and diverse. Also, different views are expressed in this volume. Some authors concentrate on the status of topics and non-topics in so-called topic prominent languages (i.e. Chinese), others focus on the syntactic behavior of topical constituents in specific European languages (German, Greek, Romance languages). The last contribution tries to bring together the concept of discourse topic (a non-syntactic notion) and the concept of sentence topic, i.e. that type of topic that all the preceding papers are concerned with

ACQUIRING SCOPE: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY

Based on the spontaneous data of a Chinese-speaking child collected from 1 year old up to 4+ years old, this study focuses on the development of his scope by examining the scope interaction between negation and quantified NPs that occur in preverbal positions. It is found that the child is sensitive to scope at 3;2, an age much earlier than the age reported in other studies (e.g., age of 6 in Lee 1991). Further evidence shows that the child has mastered scope of negation and scope in general at the age of 4. First, starting from age 4;3, the child has managed to mark universal quantifiers and wh-phrases as well as duration phrases occurring in the preverbal position with scope markers such as dou ‘all’ and you ‘have’. Second, by the age of 4;5, the child has placed duration phrases in target positions in relation to negation

Identical topics in Mandarin Chinese and Shanghainese

Identical topic (IT henceforth) was previously known as copying topic (Xu & Liu (1998:141-157). It is fully or partially identical to a corresponding element (CE henceforth) occurring in the following part of the clause. Broadly speaking, IT is semantically empty. Being an unusual type of adding, it properly falls into the central concern of this volume. It seems IT can be attested in all Chinese dialects, though the phenomena in question have been poorly documented and have scarcely been studied under a unified category. IT seems to be a better candidate to characterise topic prominent languages than many other topic types including the non-gap topic, which has long been called "Chinese style topic" since Chafe (1976) and has been viewed as a major characteristic of topic prominent languages (e.g., Li & Thompson, 1976, Xu & Langendoen 1985, Gasde 1999). I believe the study of IT structure is necessary to obtain a clearer and more complete picture of topic structure in general. As far as I know, Wu dialects of Chinese, including Shanghainese, are the ones which have the richest IT types and the greatest text frequency of IT. Therefore, this study will be based on both Mandarin and Shanghainese data

POSSESSOR EXTRACTION IN MANDARIN CHINESE REVISITED: A PRO ANALYSIS

In this paper, the pro analysis along with multiple object analysi

Master of Arts

thesisThis thesis investigates the predicate cleft (PC) constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Cheng & Vicente conclude that the topicalized verb and the lower verb in bare PC form a long head movement relation, discarding a remnant movement analysis based on vP-external scrambling. However, to be complete, the argument also needs to consider vP-internal scrambling observed by Soh and a selective deletion analysis. I show that vP-internal scrambling cannot serve to derive a plausible remnant movement analysis; nor can a selective deletion analysis be accomplished. Long head movement is necessary to account for Mandarin bare PC. However, although this conclusion converges with cross-linguistic treatment of predicate clefts, I point out the unreliability of idiom interpretation as a diagnostic for long head movement used in several studies. Moreover, I present the puzzling restriction on the types of categories that can undergo pied-piping with the fronted verb. Last, I show that the verb doubling effect, an unresolved issue in Cheng & Vicente, can be accounted for, if the proposal on parallel chains is adopted. The necessity of a long head movement analysis supports bare phrase structure whereby head-to-spec movement is expected. In addition, it constitutes as an empirical argument against eliminating syntactic head movement. The compositionality of idiom interpretation and the restriction on full PC are worth further study