The syntax of focus and topic in Mandarin Chinese

This dissertation investigates topic and focus constructions in Mandarin Chinese with particular emphasis on understanding their structural representations. Structural focus involving overt focus movement is manifested in lian ... dou/ye 'even ... all/also' and object dislocation constructions in Chinese. Chapter two first provides detailed discussion of the categorial status of lian, dou/ye and focused constituents that admit movement, the interpretation of lian ... dou/ye sentences, and Chinese clausal structure. I propose a post-subject, strict preverbal focus projection and focus movement, (lian-)focalization. Focalization is triggered by formal (+Focus) feature checking in Spec-Head configuration, adopting Chomsky (1993; 1995). Chapter three presents movement diagnoses and a unified account for lian ... dou/ye and object preposing sentences.; Focus and topic are grammatical distinguished with respect to the strict post-subject/preverbal position. Nevertheless, focus constituents can occur in a sentence-initial position. The focus constituent is either topicalized to be contrastively interpreted or base-generated sentence-initially to denote whole sentence focus scope. Consequently, the traditionally assumed discourse distinction of "new" and "old" information in focus and topic cannot adequately account for the Chinese facts in this regard. A merged grammatical representation for both topic and "focused topic" is called for. I argue for the movement of topicalization. The genuine topic moves to the TopicP Spec position in root contexts to represent predicational judgment, in the sense of Kuroda (1965; 1972; 1992). Moreover, I argue for a base-generated IP-adjoined major subject position for the so-called base-generated "topic" with or without a gap. The base-generation structure also hinges on the presence of major subject in Chinese, on a par with that in Japanese. Hence, the proposed structure provides a natural account for the long-standing debate of (non-)movement of topic structure, and the identification of empty categories and overt pronominal copies. Chapter five shows that Chinese movement structures do not correspond to Japanese scrambling. Even-focus scope is represented in syntax in Chinese but at LF in English.