漢語領屬話題結構的允准條件

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 in 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. The semantic and pragmatic factors play an important rule 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.