A Syntax Study On Dislocation Of Adverbs In Mandarin Chinese

Dislocation, a common language phenomenon in colloquial, arouses widespread concern of many linguists. Previous studies focus on exploring the types, features and motivation of dislocation. For understanding the motivation of dislocation, though researchers have made depth analysis from the perspective of functionality and syntax, there are many disputes left. As for Adverbs dislocation, except macroscopical conserns, there should have been special studies on this topic. So this article concentrates on syntactic motivation of adverbs dislocation from the perspective of generative grammar. We try to give a detailed description of the syntactic pro cess and explain the syntactic motivation of adverbs dislocation based on the typical adverb, dou.Based on the analysis of two types of dou dislocation, we argue that the reason why dou is at the end of sentence is the left movement of predicate. Predicate modified by dou is the semantics focus and been emphasized pragmatically. In order to be the focus, predicate moves forwardly. The movement of predicate to [spec, FocusP] is driven by [+F] feature carried by the head of FocusP. The syntactic process of dislocation shows as follows: the predicate which needs to be emphasized is given focus feature [+F] by pragmatic factor. At the same time, the independent focus projection within a sentence is activated. The strong feature carried by the head of FocusP, Foc0, is checked via the movement of vP to the specifier of FocusP( [spec, FocusP]).Some adverbs can be dislocated while others can not. Low adverbs, such as manner adverbs, degree adverbs, scope adverbs and negative adverbs can not be dislocated separately because of their intimate contact with the predicate. They should be moved with predicate. Apart from syntactic factor, many other factors such as prosodic and stylistic factors also affect the dislocation of adverbs.