Architecture of the Periphery and Minimalism

Architecture of the Periphery in Chinese offers a comprehensive survey on the fine structure of the sentence peripheral domain in Mandarin Chinese from a cartographic perspective. Different functional projections hosting sentence-final particles, implicit operators and other informational components are hierarchically ordered according to the "Subjectivity Scale Constraint" functioning at syntax-discourse interface. Three questions will be essentially addressed: What is the order? How to determine such an order? Why such an order? This research not only gives a thorough examination of the peripheral elements in Chinese but also improves the general understanding of the ordering issue in the left-periphery crosslinguistically. This book is aimed at scholars interested in Chinese syntax or generative syntax.

Victor Junnan Pan is a professor of theoretical linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages in The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He worked previously as an associate professor with Habilitation in the University Paris Diderot-Paris 7. He has also been a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France since 2017. He has published five research monographs in both English and French. Specializing in generative syntax, his research covers Chinese syntax, French syntax, syntax-semantics-discourse interface and others, and the topics he has investigated include interrogatives, quantification in formal linguistics, information structure, left-periphery, cartography, resumptivity, A'-dependency, locality and the Minimalist Program.