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Syntax and Semantics of Dislocation Focus Construction in Cantonese UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Syntax and Semantics of Dislocation Focus Construction in Cantonese A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Linguistics by Lawrence Y. L. Cheung 2005 The thesis of Lawrence Y. L. Cheung is approved. _________________________________ Daniel Büring _________________________________ Anoop Mahajan _________________________________ Timothy Stowell, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2005 ii This thesis is dedicated to Almighty God who endows each of us with the miraculous gift of natural language . For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities— his eternal power and divine nature— have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. (NIV Romans 1: 20) 自 從 造 天 地 以 來 、 神 的 永 能 和 神 性 是 明 明 可 知 的 、 雖 是 眼 不 能 見 、 但 藉 著 所 造 之 物 、 就 可 以 曉 得 、 叫 人 無 可 推 諉 ． (羅 馬 書 一 章 二 十 節) iii Contents Acknowledgments................................................................................................................v 1. Introduction......................................................................................................................1 2. Preliminaries ....................................................................................................................4 2.1 Word Order ...............................................................................................................4 2.2 Syntactic Category of Focus Phrase ..........................................................................6 2.3 Focus..........................................................................................................................6 2.4 Sentence Particles and Their Syntactic Structure ......................................................8 3. Syntax of the DFC .........................................................................................................11 3.1 Syntactic Properties .................................................................................................11 3.1.1 Zinghai 'Only'....................................................................................................12 3.1.2 Doudai (Cantonese Wh-the-hell) ......................................................................15 3.1.3 Principle C Violations.......................................................................................17 3.2 Syntactic Structure of the DFC................................................................................19 3.2.1 Single Sentence or Parataxis.............................................................................19 3.2.2 Leftward and Rightward Movement.................................................................24 4. Constraints on the DFC..................................................................................................26 4.1 Island Constraints.....................................................................................................27 4.2 Generalized Left Branch Condition (GLBC)...........................................................29 4.2.1 Motivating GLBC .............................................................................................29 4.2.2 Is the GLBC Real?............................................................................................36 4.2.3 Can the GLBC be Derived from Other Syntactic Constraints? ........................39 4.3 Remarks ...................................................................................................................47 5. Semantics of the DFC ....................................................................................................48 5.1 More on Focus .........................................................................................................48 5.2 Accent-Focus Correspondence ................................................................................51 6. An Account of the DFC .................................................................................................52 6.1 Nuclear Stress Rule and Focus ................................................................................52 6.2 Parallelism between the Nuclear Stress Rule and the GLBC ..................................55 6.2.1 Special Status of the Spine................................................................................55 6.2.2 Invisibility of Elided Structures........................................................................57 6.3 Abstract Focus Assignment Rule.............................................................................59 7. Conclusion .....................................................................................................................62 Appendix A........................................................................................................................64 Appendix B ........................................................................................................................64 References..........................................................................................................................65 iv Acknowledgments I am indebted to my thesis committee members Daniel Büring, Anoop Mahajan and committee chair Tim Stowell for their support, suggestions and criticism. They have patiently guided me to think through many problems, though some are still unresolved. The weekly meetings have helped me reconsider many issues regarding dislocation focus construction from a much broader perspective beyond mere standard syntax accounts. Unfortunately, because of time and space, I have not been able to include many of their insights. I particularly want to thank Daniel for teaching me various accent-focus theories in a short period of time. I am also thankful for Dominique Sportiche, Hilda Koopman and Bruce Hayes for discussion at various points. I can still remember Dominique's encouragement and enthusiasm about the phenomenon the first time I presented the facts to him. I want to thank the audience at my talk (UCLA Syntax/Semantics Seminar in April, 2005) for their valuable comments and suggestions on the same topic. Special thanks go to Anoop Mahajan and Tim Stowell for making available a special fellowship for me in spring quarter 2005. It has freed me from teaching duties and helped me concentrate entirely on the research. Without the fellowship, it would be impossible for me to finish the thesis by the end of my second year. I am grateful to my wife, Jacqueline, for her continuous encouragement, support and prayers throughout. I also want to thank Leo Wong (Leiden University) and my wife for providing judgments of the sentences over Skype. Last but not least, I give the glory to the Lord for His provision of wisdom and the opportunity to receive fine linguistics education at UCLA. v ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS Syntax and Semantics of Dislocation Focus Construction in Cantonese by Lawrence Y. L. Cheung Master of Arts in Linguistics University of California, Los Angeles, 2005 Professor Timothy Stowell, Chair It has been recognized that Dislocation Focus Construction (the DFC) (also called Right Dislocation or Afterthought construction) in Cantonese (and Mandarin) performs some important discourse functions such as parenthetical and so-called conversational repair. Recent studies (Packard 1996, Cheung 1997, Law 2003) show that the DFC possesses a number of interesting and unique syntactic characteristics. In this thesis, I will first establish some crucial syntactic tests based on reconstruction effects to diagnose the DFC. Although some of these observations have been made in earlier studies, they have not been systematically used as probes to analyze some fundamental issues about the structure of the DFC. In particular, there was some confusion of the DFC with parataxis. I will follow Cheung (1997) in assuming that the main sentence and the so-called afterthought are not only related to each other pragmatically but also governed by grammatical principles. Grammatical principles are vi found to play an important role in this parenthetical construction. This thesis also has provided some new findings about the semantic aspects of the DFC. The DFC modifies the focus the sentence and restricts the domain for focus in the Focus Phrase. Unlike syntactic interpretation, the semantic interpretation of the DFC is determined by interpreting the focus in-situ instead of reconstructing it back to its original site. This has been shown by question/answer pairs and the interaction of negation and the DFC. Towards the end, an account of the DFC has been put forward to explain many of its parallels with Nuclear Stress Rule concerning the GLBC, Visibility Condition and focus property. An abstract focus assignment rule is posited to unify the two phenomena. While the focus property is realized as nuclear pitch accent in English, it is realized as overt movement as the DFC in Cantonese. The findings suggest that focus assignment is not determined purely pragmatically. Grammatical principles also constrain some types of focus assignment. vii 1. Introduction This thesis studies a word order phenomenon in Cantonese that has been referred to as "right dislocation", "inversion", "postposing" and "afterthought" in previous studies (Chao 1968, Lu 1980, Tai and Hu 1991, Guo 1999). Like other Chinese languages, Cantonese does not have rich morphology and its order word is relatively fixed. However, it is common to find non-canonical word order in spoken Cantonese.
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