ABSTRACT
In Mandarin Chinese, the predicate of a sentence itself may be a subject-predicate construction. This complex predicate is referred to as ‘subject-predicate predicate’ (Chinese: 主谓谓语; pinyin: zhǔwèi wèiyǔ; shortened as ‘S-P predicate’). Accordingly, such a sentence is actually an SP-predicate sentence, namely ‘subject-predicate predicate’ sentence (Chinese: 主谓谓语句; pinyin: zhǔwèi wèiyǔ jù). The SP-predicate sentence has a topic-comment structure, which has been a major research theme for linguistic typologists from a communicative-functional perspective. For instance, with regard to the existence of SP-predicate sentences, Li and Thompson (1976) claim that Chinese is a topic-prominent language, whereas English is subject-prominent. According to them, although the subject-predicate and topic-comment relations co-exist in Chinese, the latter has greater typological significance. For this reason, they treat the topic-comment structure not as derivative but as fundamental. That is, the SP-predicate sentence is not derived from the subject-predicate sentence (Chinese: 主谓句; pinyin: zhǔwèi jù; shortened as S-P sentence). As a matter of fact, even though the SP-predicate sentence can be proven as base-generated, it is not convincing to say that Chinese is not subject-prominent but topic-prominent. Let us begin this chapter with the SP-predicate sentence.
