The Motivated Topicalization and Referentiality of the Compound Noun in Chinese

摘要

This paper mainly studies the compound noun in Chinese in terms of forming process and motivation. Instead of OV inversion of the Chinese compound noun in previous studies, we claimed that the core of its forming process is topicalization. This involves the object-fronting movement and the relativization based on the downgraded predication structure. The first component stem of the compound is an object-topic, but not an inverted object. This topicalization may be attributed to the topic-prominent feature of Chinese. Moreover, the motivation of the object-fronting movement is to obtain the referentiality resulting in a process of decategorization.