Chinese double nominative structure revisited

Yao Yao
UC Berkeley

This study reviews some previous analyses of the double nominative (DN) construction in mandarin Chinese (Teng 1974, Shi 2000, Tsao 2005, among others), reveals a number of properties that are not noted previously but strongly indicated in our corpus data, and proposes a more complete treatment for the construction. Under the proposal, there are two possible ways for the topic phrase in a DN construction to enter the semantic composition. A topic phrase may either specify a domain restriction on some quantificational element of the comment clause, or fulfill an argument requirement of an NP in the comment. The analysis can also be extended to other topic sentences whose surface structure is not a prototypical DN construction. The result of this study suggests a generalized DN construction which accommodates both subtypes of DN as well as extended DN structures. It also sheds light on the exact nature of the aboutness relation between topic and comment, which has been claimed for a long time but never explicitly defined.