The Copy Theory Of Movement And Topicalization In Chinese

A topic, in Chinese, is invariably an unmarked NP or an equivalent element, occupying the initialposition of a clause and related to a gap or a position in a clause; topic is a pragmatic and discourse notion,representing an entity which has been mentioned in the previous discourse and being discussed again in thecurrent situation. In other words, a topic represents old information known by the speaker and the hearer.As a productive means for sentence derivation in Chinese, the topic construction is one of hot topics forlinguistic studies.The core problem for the topic construction in Chinese is how the topic is derived. Linguists havecarried many researches on topicalization in Chinese, explaining it from the perspective of semantics orfrom the perspective of narrow syntax. From the structural perspective, some linguists, represented byLi&Thompson (1976,1981), Xu (1985,1986) and Hu&Pan (2002), claim that the topic is semanticallybased-generated. Some linguists, like Shi (1998,2000) and Zhang (2009), state that all topics in Chinesetopic constructions, like English counterpart, are moved from the inside of the comment to the initialposition, denying the existence of dangling topics in Chinese. But, how are the so-called dangling topicsmoved from the comment? Shi and Zhang do not provide convincing explanation. Besides, some linguists,like Huang (2008), Gu (2001a,2006), suggest that some topics in Chinese are base-generated, and some aregenerated by movement.This paper adopts the copy theory of movement proposed by Chomsky (1993) to illustrate that thederivation of the non-dangling topic in Chinese is similar to that of the English topic. The non-danglingtopic in Chinese is derived by movement and the topic is related to a syntactic structural position in thecomment, which can be filled either by a null spell-out or a resumptive pronoun. In other words, thenon-dangling topic in Chinese is syntactically licensed by a structural position in the comment. Similarly,the dangling topic is also generated by movement involving the preposition-dropping, which is one of thespecific features of Chinese. In light of Chinese word order and phonetic feature of the language, this paperillustrates that the Constraints on Copy Deletion (CCD) proposed by Tue Trinh (2009) predicts thecopy-deletion of topics in Chinese. Under the Minimalist Program (MP), every item in the lexicon possesses a feature set containing anumber of features, including semantic feature, categorical feature and syntactic feature, some of which areinterpretable, some are uninterpretable. Radford (2009) continues the way of the Split-CP Hypothesisproposed by Rizzi (1997), and suggests that the Spec of TopP possesses an uninterpretable strong featureattracting the movement of an element with [-uTop] feature in the comment to fulfill it. At the Spec, theuninterpretable features of both are checked. Therefore, this paper maintains that the derivation of the topicis the process of copy-movement and feature-checking in Chinese.