Leiden University Student Repository

Hermes, Sophia Pauline (2019)

Grasping the Dangling Topic - A New Approach to Explaining Gapless Topic-Sentences in Mandarin

Master thesis | Linguistics (MA)

In this thesis, the phenomenon of dangling topic sentences in Mandarin is investigated. These topics can appear without obvious marking in sentence initial position and are not related to a resumptive pronoun or a gap in the comment. The goal is to explain that these sentences are actually not exclusive to Mandarin, but also appear in many other languages. Furthermore, I provide evidence that suggests that these topics receive a topic marker that is part of the numeration and are thus not as "bare" as they appear to be at first glance. This marker can either be realized prosodically or by a particle.

Chinese

Mandarin

Linguistics

Syntax

Topic

Dangling Topic

Author

Hermes, Sophia Pauline

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

MA Chinese Linguistics

Supervisors

Sybesma, Rint
Barbiers, Sjef

ECTS Credits

20

Language

en