A Syntactic Analysis Of Object Preposing In Mandarin Chinese

This thesis investigates object preposing constructions in Mandarin Chinese from the Generative Perspective.It focuses on two constructions: SOV construction with a bare preposed object and the lian…dou construction.The author first defines the information structure of the two constructions,and then within the framework of Cartographic Approach,provides a syntactic analysis of them.From the perspective of syntactic-pragmatics,the status of grammatical elements in information structure often depends on the context.This thesis argues that the bare preposed object can be understood as topic or information focus within a certain context,while in the absence of context,it behaves more like a topic and should be regarded as topic.In the lian…dou construction,the preposed object manifests the properties of focus.Given that the focus is different from information focus and identificational focus,we call it even-focus.As for the inner syntactic structure of the two object-preposing constructions,it is proposed that both the topic and focus elements in Chinese can be located between IP and VP.When considered a topic or focus,the bare preposed object occupies the [Spec TopP] and [Spec info-FocP] respectively.However,in the lian…dou construction,dou is the head of even-Foc P and the focused element is lian-NP(i.e.,the object merges with lian),occupying [Spec even-FocP] position.In terms of the generative process,no matter what position the bare preposed object and lian-NP occupy eventually,they are all generated after the verb and preposed to its surface position after A-movement.In addition,this thesis also explores the syntactic distribution of Top P and Foc P in relation to other sentence components,which supports the hierarchical structure within IP as we proposed.