Acceso usuarios
Wei-Cherng Sam Jheng
By drawing on data of two types of VP dislocation in Mandarin, this paper argues that these two types represent a syntactic incarnation of XP-split constructions providing an interesting argument for the conception of information structure starting in the numeration and multiple Spell-Out of copies regulated by the checking of strong features over the course of a syntactic derivation. Building on Fanselow and Ćavar’s (2002) distributed deletion analysis, I show that Type 1 involves two autonomous nominals that form a nominal predicate structure in a VP, and the VP is copied and internally merged to a topic position, followed by multiple Spell-Out of the copies whose information structural features are checked. In contrast, Type 2 is derived via base-generation. I argue that the two types are derived employing the same set of operations in the computational system without extra postulations. Issues involved in dealing with Mandarin topic constructions are addressed.
