The Information Structure of Lian Construction in Mandarin

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.