Pragmatic effects of polarity items revealing focal prominence in Mandarin word order

Abstract

This paper investigates the information structure of Mandarin Chinese word order through studying the distribution of minimizers, a distinct class of negative polarity items. The emphatic nature of minimizers is an effective indicator for distinguishing the strength of focal prominence in different syntactic construals. The corpus analysis compares the frequency of minimizers in different word order patterns, in different strategies of modification, and in different forms. The results show that their distribution is associated with how arguments are profiled in the information structure since minimizers tend to occur in the positions where their pragmatic inferences are maximally induced. The distribution of minimizers is the result of weighing syntactic constraints and pragmatic effects. The study contributes to characterizing the fine differences of the word order patterns in terms of focal saliency.