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Das Papier argumentiert anhand einer Reihe von Phänomenen für die Existenz einer ausgezeichneten Topikdomäne im Mittelfeld des deutschen Satzes. Deutsch ist somit Diskurs-konfigurational hinsichtlich Topiks. Die Beobachtung erlaubt die Beantwortung einiger grundlegender Fragen wie die nach der möglichen Anzahl van Satztopiks, nach der Möglichkeit von Satztopiks in eingebetteten Sätzen oder nach dem Zusammenhang von Scrambling und Topikstatus. Die These, die 'starke' Interpretation einer indefiniten Phrase impliziere deren Topikstatus, wird zurückgewiesen. Syntaktische Eigenschaften der Topik-Voranstellung im Mittelfeld werden herausgearbeitet und ihre Implikationen für die Theoriebildung werden erörtert.
This article discusses some syntactic peculiarities of Chinese yes/no questions. Starting from the observation that Standard Mandarin shares significant typological features with prototypical SOV languages, Chinese is treated as an underlyingly verb-final language. Based on this heuristic principle, A-not-AB, AB-not-A and AB-not questions are uniformly derived by means of one simple raising rule that operates within the sentence constituent V'. This novel idea is elaborated on in great detail in the first part of the article. In contrast to the prevailing trend, it is argued that the question operator contained in A-not-A and A-not sentences CANNOT be raised to "Comp". In consequence, A-not-A and A-not questions are "typed" in the head position of a sentence-internal functional phrase that we call Force2 Phrase (F2P) in the present paper. This position is not to be confused with Drubig's (1994) Polarity 1 Phrase (PollP), in the head position of which assertive negations and an abstract affirmative element are located. The existence of a head position F2° other than Poll° is supported by the fact that F2° can be occupied by certain overt question operators, such as assertive shi-bu-shi, which are compatible with negations. In contrast to the assertive question operator shi-bu-shi which is obligatorily associated with information focus, non-assertive shi-bu-shi serves as a compound focus and question operator whose focus feature is complex insofar as it is composed of two subfeatures: a contrastivity and an exhaustivity subfeature. Non-assertive shi-bu-shi is obligatorily associated with identificational focus in the sense of Kiss (1998). In accordance with some basic ideas of Chomsky's checking theory, the two subfeatures of the complex focus feature carried by the non-assertive shi-bu-shi operator check a correlating subfeature in the head position of a corresponding functional phrase (Contrastive Phrase and Focus Phrase, respectively). The question feature contained in the non-assertive shi-bu-shi operator is attracted by the head of Force1 Phrase (F1') at the level of LF. Due to the fact that F1° is sentence-final, the question feature of non-assertive shi-bu-shi must be Chomsky-adjoined to F1'. Unlike identificational focus phrases which are inherently contrastive, topics are non-contrastive in the default case. As separate speech acts, they are located in a c-commanding position outside the sentence structure. Semantically, there is a difference between Frame-Setting Topics and Aboutness Topics. As shown in the article, both A-not-A and A-not questions on the one hand and yes/no questions ending with ma on the other can be used in neutral and non-neutral contexts. The decisive advantage of mu questions, however, is that their question operator has scope over the whole sentence.
In this paper I would like to show that the principles which have been proposed so far to account for the relationship between the informational level and the syntactic level in a Chinese utterance are unable to predict some interesting and regular facts of that language.
To my mind, the form and the position of the question operator in an interrogative utterance provide two distributional tests which univocally indicate where the new information lies. Hence, the pairing of affirmative and interrogative sentences might be a better approach to locate where the new information lies in a Chinese utterance.
In this paper I show that the different case marking possibilities on predicate adjectives in depictive secondary predicates in Russian constitute the uninterpretable counterpart of the interpretable tense and aspect features of the adjective. Case agreement entails that the predicate adjective is non-eventive, i.e., it occurs when the event time of the secondary predicate is identical to the event time of the primary predicate. The instrumental case, however, entails that the secondary predicate is eventive: some change of state or transition occurred prior to or during the event time of the primary predicate. I claim that case agreement occurs in conjoined tense phrases in Russian, while the instrumental case occurs in adjoined aspectual phrases. In English, secondary predication is sensitive both to the structural location of its antecedent and to the event structure of the primary predicate. I suggest that depictives with subject antecedents in English are true adjunction structures, while those with direct object antecedents occur in a conjoined aspectual phrase. This hypothesis finds support in the different movement and semantic constraints in conjunction versus adjunction phrases in both English and Russian.
In this paper I put forward and justify a syntactic configuration that I call Complex Small Clause-structure. I show that this single syntactic structure can explain both the semantic value and the syntactic behavior of a range of constructions that up to now have been explored separately and, hence, proposed divergent analyses among them.
In this work, I provide an analysis of adjectival depictive constructions which accounts for most of their fundamental properties. First, I focus on the restrictions having to do with the integration of the depictive and the verbal predicate: they are based on aspectual compatibility between the two predicates, which, in turn, will depend on the ability, on the part of the depictive, to make reference to some (sub)event in the event structure of the verbal predicate. Facts not captured by previous approaches in the literature will be straightforwardly accounted for, among them the possibility to have I-L depictive constructions, and the impossibility to combine a depictive with some non-stative verbal predicates. Second, it will be shown that the informational import of the depictive in the sentence can be equivalent to that of the verbal predicate: both can be the primary lexical basis of predication. This is reflected in the sentence in various ways, having to do with aspectual modifiers, and in the properties of the sentential subject. In this connection, we will reconsider the notion of subject, arguing that no subject-predicate relation takes place in the lexical domain of sentences, and hence that the argument the depictive is oriented to, the common argument, cannot be a subject of the depictive. Finally, a minimalist analysis is proposed for the syntax of the construction, in terms of direct syntactic merge of predicative constituents and sidewards (q-to-q) movement for the common argument, from the lexical domain of the depictive to the lexical domain of the verb. As to morphosyntactic properties, a syntactic Double Agree relation is assumed to hold between T/v, as probes, on the one hand, and the common argument and depictive, as simultaneous goals, on the other, which would allow for the deletion of Case features on both goals. The assumed presence of Structural Case on the adjectival depictive will be responsible for the well-known restriction on the orientation of depictives to the sentential subject or object.
In this paper I firstly argue that secondary predicates are complement of v, and v is overtly realized by Merge or Move in secondary predication in Chinese. The former option derives the de-construction, whereas the latter option derives the V-V construction. Secondly, I argue that resultatives are hosted by complement vPs, whereas depictives are hosted by adjunct vPs. This complement-adjunct asymmetry accounts for a series of syntactic properties of secondary predication in Chinese: the position of a secondary predicate with respect to the verb of the primary predicate, the co-occurrence patterns of secondary predicates, the hierarchy of depictives, the control and ECM properties of resultative constructions, and the locality constraint on the integration of secondary predicates into the structure of primary predication. Thirdly, I argue that the surface position of de is derived by a PF operation which attaches de to the right of the leftmost verbal lexical head of the construction. Finally, I argue that in the V-V resultative construction, the assumed successive head-raising may account for the possible subject-oriented reading of the resultative predicate, and that the head raising out of the lower vP accounts for the possible non-specific reading of the subject of the resultative predicate.
In this study, I investigate the positions and interpretations available to 'manner' adverbs in English. My central claim, contra Wyner (1994, 1998), is that an association does exist between 'manner' adverb positions and interpretations, which is best characterized in terms of Peterson's (1997) distinction between 'restrictive' and 'non-restrictive' modification. I also claim, however, that the association in question is not as general as commonly claimed; and, in particular, does not apply directly to 'manner' adverbs in 'fronted' and 'parenthetical' positions, which require special syntactic description.