Presentation: From Comment to Topic

Representing Topic-Comment Structures in Chinese

Shi (2000) claims that topics must be related to a syntactic position in the comment, thus denying the existence of dangling topics in Chinese. Under Shi's analysis, the dangling topic sentences in Chinese are not topic-comment but subject-predicate sentences. However, Shi's arguments are not without problems. In this paper we argue that topics in Chinese can be licensed not only by a syntactic...

Complex Topic-Comment Structures in HPSG

Based on Krifka (1992) and de Kuthy (2000), this paper develops an architecture for complex topic-comment structures in HPSG and applies it to predicate fronting in English with the goal of capturing the insights of Ward (1988) on this construction. We argue that predicate fronting is a distributed constructional form consisting of an auxiliary occurring in a predicate preposing phrase. The use...

Complex Topic-Comment Structures in HPSG

(1) can be uttered as part of a ”strategy of inquiry” (Roberts 1998, 4) where it is under discussion what members of a contextually given set of people wanted to see. It reports on Sandy’s wishes as opposed to those of the other members of the set. The felicity of this sentence under these circumstances can be made to follow from the assumption that the content of What Sandy wanted to see is th...

comment to “telaprevir experience from turkey”

Topic and Topic-Comment Structures in First Language Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese

The prevalence of topic-comment structures is one of the most distinctive features of Mandarin Chinese. It has been shown that young children in the early stages of syntax acquisition have the ability to distinguish between the notions of subject and topic; however, the production frequency and the types of topiccomment structures produced by young children in spontaneous speech have yet to be ...