Taiwanese complementizer kóng, sentence-final particles, and the final-over-final condition

Abstract

Recent research (Paul 2014, Erlewine 2017) has found Mandarin sentence-final particles (SFPs) to be C heads, as per Rizzi (1997). This apparently violates the proposed universal Final-over-Final Condition (FOFC; Sheehan et. al. 2017), which prohibits the projection of any head-final phrase over a head-initial one. This paper brings this issue into Taiwanese, which has the added complexity of a head-initial complementizer kóng. I use co-occurrence restrictions to argue that Taiwanese SFPs occupy multiple head positions, and show that only one of these can be embedded. The result is argued to support the generalization from Richards (2016) and Erlewine (2017) that FOFC applies only within individual phases.