With regard to the last type of dangling topic, consider the following example from Chen (1996).
(58) Wu-jia Niuyue zui gui thing-price New York most expensive
‘Speaking of the price of things, New York is the most expensive.’
Shi argues that it is more natural to think of the price of things, instead of the place/location like New York, as the highest in value and thus that the subject should be the initial NP wujia ‘the price of things’. Under this analysis, Niuyue ‘New York’
is treated as a locative adverbial. In support of the initial NP wujia ‘the price of things’ in (58) not as a dangling topic but a subject, Shi resorts to a test based on adverb placement.
(59) Wu-jia yi-ding Niuyue zui gui.
thing-price certainly New York most expensive ‘The price of things is certainly the highest in New York.’
Shi claims that adverbs like yiding ‘certainly’ and jingchang ‘often’ can occur only between the subject and predicate. Since (59) can pass this adverb test, the initial NP wujia ‘the price of things’ must be a subject.
As with Shi’s zhuanmen ‘specifically’ and modal-verb tests, Pan and Hu argue against this adverb test based on the following example.
(60) Niuyue yiding wu-jia zui gui.
New York certainly thing-price most expensive ‘The price of things is certainly the highest in New York.’
Shi’s adverb test would predict that the post-adverb string wujia zui gui ‘the price of things is the highest’ is the predicate. However, this prediction is undesirable because the string is a full sentence. We agree with Pan and Hu’s critique that adverbs cannot be used to test the subject-predicate structure.
To account for this sixth type of dangling topic like wujia ‘the price of things’ in (58), Pan and Hu again propose the set-member account.
(61) Wu-jia, Niuyue (-de wu-jia) zui gui.
thing-price New York (-GEN thing-price) most expensive ‘As for the price of things, New York(’s price of things) is the highest.’
It is claimed that wujia ‘the price of things’ is the dangling topic, and that Niuyue (de wujia) ‘New York (’s price of things)’ is the subject of the comment clause. As indicated by the parentheses, the subject Niuyue ‘New York’ contains an empty head noun wujia ‘the price of things’. Under this analysis, the sentence is interpreted as meaning that when commodity prices all over the world are considered, the price in New York is the highest. That is, the initial NP wujia ‘the price of things’ is a set representing the world’s commodity prices, among which the price in New York is a member.
Promising as this set-member account may appear, it runs into a problem when we try to license the dangling topic the same way as shown in (62).
(62) *Mama, Zhangsan (-de Mama) zui qinqie.
mother Zhangsan (-GEN mother) most kind ‘As for mothers, Zhangsan(’s mother) is the kindest.’
Here, (62) shares a parallel structure with (61); its unacceptability, however, is unexpected under the set-member account. We thus conclude that Shi’s
non-dangling-topic approach fares better than Pan and Hu’s dangling-topic approach.
3. Conclusion
This paper has compared and contrasted two different views as to whether dangling topics exist in Mandarin Chinese. Shi’s approach denies such a possibility.
According to his analysis, all topics in Chinese must have a structural position, either occupied by a resumptive pronoun or an empty category, inside the comment clause.
In other words, all Chinese topics are syntactically licensed. He attributes so-called dangling Chinese-style topics to be subjects, (non-dangling) topics, PP-reduced forms, or sentential adverbials. In contrast, Pan and Hu’s approach acknowledges the existence of dangling topics in Mandarin Chinese. Under their analysis, Chinese topics can be either syntactically or semantically licensed. Semantically licensed topics are dangling topics. They can be licensed in terms of a thematic relation, set-member relation or cause-effect relation.
In this paper, we have argued against Pan and Hu’s dangling-topic approach but in favor of Shi’s non-dangling-topic approach. Throughout the discussion, we have carefully examined the counterarguments and alternative proposals provided by Pan and Hu. The results of this study show that although some tests (e.g. based on the placement of modal verbs, shi ‘be’ and adverbs) used by Shi do not go through, the problems pointed out by Pan and Hu can be solved within Shi’s system. In other words, we have modified some analyses given by Shi in order to take the counterexamples observed by Pan and Hu into consideration. The comparison among the analyses provided by Shi, Pan and Hu and the present authors is shown in Table 2.
Table 2. Three views on status of sentence-initial NPs
Six Types Pan and Hu Shi This paper
1 [Tamen] da-yu chi xiao-yu. Dg. topic Subject Subject
2 [Tamen] shei dou bu lai. Dg. topic Subject Subject
[Na-chang huo], xingkui xiaofang-dui
lai-de-kuai. Dg. topic NP topic NP adverbials
3
[Na-chang huo] xiaofang-dui lai-de-kuai. Dg. topic NP adverbials NP adverbials
[Zhe-jian shiqing] ni bu neng guang
mafan yi-ge ren. Dg. topic PP-reduced
form NP topic
[Shengwu-lunlixue] wo shi men-wai-han. Dg. topic PP-reduced form
PP-reduced form
4
[Xihongshi] wo chao le ji-dan. Dg. topic Not mentioned NP topic
5 [Na-zhong douzi] yi-jin san-shi-kuai qian. Dg. topic Subject Subject
6 [Wu-jia] Niuyue zui gui. Dg. topic Subject Subject
As indicated in Table (2), we have taken the approach advocated by Shi but departed from his analysis in analyzing several subtypes of the alleged
“dangling-topic” constructions. More specifically, what differentiates Shi’s analysis and ours concerns what we do in fixing problems that arise in Shi’s analysis. As should be clear from the discussion in Section 2, in this paper we have evaluated two opposing views toward the issue of dangling topics and the result of our investigation favors Shi’s approach. Despite adopting his approach, we have fixed some problems with his analyses that have been pointed out by Pan and Hu. Of the two approaches, Shi’s is not well recognized15 and Pan and Hu’s, in fact, is a more traditional one.
Our paper concludes that the problems pointed out by Pan and Hu for Shi’s approach are only apparent – even though they are problems for Shi’s ANALYSIS, they can be solved in Shi’s SYSTEM. We believe that our analysis has shown that Shi’s approach is a workable and feasible one.
In summary, this paper rejects Pan and Hu’s semantic licensing of dangling topics and supports Shi’s analysis that so-called dangling topics are actually subjects, NP topics, NP adverbials, or PP-reduced forms.
15 Shi’s approach to “dangling-topic” constructions is not even mentioned by Huang, Li and Li (2004) in their review of previous analyses of such constructions.
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[Received 3 October 2005; revised 20 November 2005; accepted 22 November 2005]
Department of English
National Taiwan Normal University Taipei, TAIWAN
Rui-heng Huang: [email protected] Jen Ting: [email protected]