A semantic–pragmatic interface account of (dangling) topics in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to propose a unified account for both moved and base-generated topics in Mandarin Chinese. It is well known that, besides moved topics (or, instance topics in Chen's (1996) terminology), Mandarin Chinese also has base-generated topics, i.e., the so-called dangling topics in the literature, or Chinese-style topics (Chafe, 1976). Since they are not subcategorized by the predicate in question, dangling topics may not necessarily be related to a syntactic position in the comment. Traditionally, the relation between the latter kind of topic and its comment is characterized by an aboutness condition (Chao, 1968; Chafe, 1976; Li and Thompson, 1981; Xu and Langendoen, 1985), though the precise nature of aboutness has never been made clear. In an effort to adequately characterize both moved topics and dangling topics in Mandarin Chinese, this paper proposes that topic structures be accounted for at the semantic–pragmatic interface in Mandarin Chinese. It claims that in Mandarin Chinese a topic is licensed if there is a variable in the comment and the set generated by this variable produces a non-empty set when intersecting with the set represented by the topic. The topic licensing condition proposed in the paper, as a further development to the traditional aboutness condition, is a necessary and sufficient condition. It can not only avoid the problems that the traditional aboutness condition has in licensing topics, but also have the advantage of unifying both the moved topic and the base-generated topic.