Investigating Filler-Gap Dependencies in Chinese Topicalization

The present study explored the on-line process of constructing filler-gap dependencies in Chinese topic structures. In a topic structure, extracting the topic from within a sentence is subject to locality constraints; for instance, gaps inside islands such as adverbial clauses are prohibited. Interestingly, similar to the parasitic gap (PG) construction in English, a gap in an adverbial clause can be saved if there is a gap in the main clause. Based on the results of a moving-window self-paced reading experiment that investigated the processing of transitive verbs and coverbs inside adverbial clauses, we suggest that filler-gap dependencies are constructed during real-time processing of Chinese topicalization structures. Our results suggest that the parser actively searches for a gap site and is also sensitive to the syntactic restrictions on parasitic gap constructions in Chinese. Our findings are compatible with a movement analysis of Chinese topicalization and provide further support for the existence of parasitic gaps in Chinese.