Dislocation focus construction in Chinese

Abstract

The use of the Dislocation Focus Construction (DFC) (also known as “Right Dislocation”) in colloquial Chinese (including Cantonese and Mandarin) gives rise to various non-canonical word orders. In DFCs, the sentence particle (SP) occurs in a sentence-medial position. The pre- and post-SP materials are demonstrated to be syntactically connected, based on four diagnostic tests, namely (i) the zinghai ‘only’ test, (ii) the doudai (“wh-the-hell”) test, (iii) polarity item licensing, and (iv) Principle C violations. The findings offer new insights into the syntax of the Chinese left periphery and constraints on focus movement. First, the observations entail that Chinese CPs are head-initial, and an XP is obligatorily moved around the SP to a position higher than the CP. Second, the XP-raising in the DFC is argued to be driven by focus because of the focus interpretation induced. It is discovered that the focus movement is subject to the Spine Constraint, which turns out to be remarkably similar to the properties of the Nuclear Stress Rule (e.g., selection of focus set and metrical invisibility). It is argued that the DFC is the syntactic realization of the rule.