Abstract:
A lot of discussions of the information structure of
lian construction can be found in academia. This paper analyzed the status of the
lian-constituent and the role of
lian from the perspective of information structures and claimed that the constituent associated with
lian was a focus instead of a topic and the role of
lian was to mark the focus status of
lian associates, and
lian was a scalar focus operator. There was no polarity requirement of
lian associate and its alternatives, and the difference between the variants of
lian construction was due to the different semantic requirement of the adverbs in the construction.