relative prominence and focus licensing (focus structure and sentence licensing)

This article provides an OT solution for the observation that in Mandarin bare nominals can be predicated of subject directly while bare adjectives cannot without the insertion of a semantically bleached adverb hen, which is addressed as two independent issues in previous works. It is argued that the asymmetry between nominal predication and adjective predication is due to the requirement that both constraints Stress-XP and StressPredicate must be satisfied while the constraint T/VP gives in in the out-of-the-blue context. In contrastive focus context, however, the constraint Stress-Focus is active and overrides all of other constraints. It is then followed that the Mandarin copula-less sentences are focused. This result lends support to the idea that Chinese is either focused or tensed by providing evidence that in some cases the sentence is licensed in terms of appropriate stress pattern, which is generally utilized to realize focus structure.