ABSTRACT
The cartographic approach was initially applied to the study of the left-periphery of Italian. The cartography approach has also been applied to different Italian dialects and other languages; more and more orders have been discovered. Obenauer establishes a hierarchy for three types of non-standard questions: the rhetorical question, the surprise-disapproval question and the can’t-find-the-value question. Projections hosting these three types of questions are higher than the projection hosting the standard information-seeking question. The orders established for different languages are not assumed to be universal; however, the cartography approach provides linguists with a very useful way to see clearly the syntactic distribution of different functional projections either in one particular language or in different languages from a comparative perspective. The left-periphery can host different types of elements in Mandarin Chinese. First, Chinese is claimed to be a topic-prominent language.
