Representing Topic-Comment Structures in Chinese

Shi (2000) claims that topics must be related to a syntactic position in the comment, thus denying the existence of dangling topics in Chinese. Under Shi's analysis, the dangling topic sentences in Chinese are not topic-comment but subject-predicate sentences. However, Shi's arguments are not without problems. In this paper we argue that topics in Chinese can be licensed not only by a syntactic gap but also by a semantic gap/variable without syntactic realization. Under our analysis, all the dangling topics discussed in Shi (2000) are, in fact, not subjects but topics licensed by a semantic gap/variable that can turn the relevant comment into an open predicate, thus licensing dangling topics and deriving well-formed topic-comment constructions. Our analysis fares better than Shi's in not only unifying the licensing mechanism of a topic to an open predicate without considering how the open predicate is derived, but also unifying the treatment of normal and dangling topics in Chinese,