摘要：Recent work has revealed that raising-to-object (RTO) constructions across languages impose two common constraints. Constructions that involve an actual movement of the “raised” phrase (XP) invariably impose a “Subject-only” constraint on XP, whereas those that contain an XP base-generated in its spell-out position require a coindexed pronoun in the embedded clause. This paper investigates an understudied type of RTO construction in the Philippine-type Austronesian language Puyuma, in which a “Subject-only” constraint on the XP is absent, and the construction need not contain an embedded pronoun coindexed with the XP. I demonstrate that the absence of these constraints follows from an embedded hanging topic analysis of the XP, whereby the XP is base-generated at the left periphery of a finite embedded clause, whose relation with the embedded CP is established through the aboutness condition. I discuss how this construction enriches the current understanding of the microvariation found in non-movement-type RTO constructions. Finally, I show that the XPs, in instances of RTO that have been analyzed as embedded topic constructions, exhibit variation in behavior parallel to topics in root clause environments, which calls for further investigation of the correlation between topics and XPs in RTO constructions.
