Complex pronouns in Wu Chinese: Focalization and topicalization
Complex pronouns in Wu Chinese: Focalization and topicalization
This chapter presents a case study of grammatical properties of complex pronouns in Wu Chinese, namely the Fuyang dialect, from both the synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The chapter argues that the syntactic context for using complex pronouns is dependent on their information status as topic or focus. A distinction is made between stressed and unstressed complex pronouns: unstressed complex pronouns are restricted to topic positions, either primary or secondary, while stressed ones have no such restriction and can serve as contrastive topic or focus. The chapter proposes that complex pronouns in Fuyang Wu involve a ‘syntactic reanalysis’, being derived from the fusion of the copula and pronouns in cleft sentences and that the fused complex pronouns undergo a grammaticalization process from focalization to topicalization.
Keywords: complex pronoun, cleft sentence, contrastiveness, focus, topic, Fuyang dialect, Wu dialect, syntactic reanalysis
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