Topic and Focus in the Left Periphery of Old Xiang: Syntactic Cartography and Semantic Constraints

Abstract

In the syntactic cartography of the left periphery (LP), topic and focus are assumed to be hierarchically ordered with a typological divergence. In Indo-European languages like Italian, topics can be higher or lower than foci, whereas in Tibeto-Burman languages like Mandarin Chinese, topics must be higher than foci. This paper explores the LP in the Old Xiang dialect, a branch of Chinese dialects, and points out that topics and foci are distributed as “CP > ‘lian’ (even) Focus > AT > HT > DPLD > ‘lian’ (even) Focus > TP”. The cartographic result shows that the hierarchical distribution of topics and foci is not typologically divergent between Italian and Chinese dialects (at least Old Xiang). The ordering is mainly restricted by semantic constraints, as well as constraints from other levels of language.