Relativized Minimality and the Licensing Conditions of Chinese Possessive Topicalization

Haihua Pan (City University of Hong Kong)
Relativized Minimality and the Licensing Conditions of Chinese Possessive Topicalization

Abstract: The possessor of a possessive construction in Mandarin can be split out of its possessee and serves as the topic of a sentence, but not all possessive constructions can be topicalized this way. By examining this phenomenon with the existing theories on topicalization, it is found that syntactic treatments that derive the topic of possessor via movements are challenged systematically by many counterexamples. Semantic and pragmatic factors play an important role in the licensing of possessive topics. To account for the derivation of possessive topicalization, a possessive topic licensing condition is proposed which consists of the ‘semantic intersection’ condition’ as the necessary condition and a ‘most plausible item condition’ as the sufficient condition, which could be considered as extending minimality to semantics and pragmatics.
Keywords: possessive construction, relativized minimality topicalization, semantic licensing condition