Why particles are not particular: sentence-final particles in Chinese as heads of a split CP

Biberauer, Newton & Sheehan (2009) claim that clause-final particles are categorially deficient. This move is motivated by the fact that a number of VO languages-among them Mandarin Chinese-display sentence-final particles (SFPs), which, when analysed as complementisers, violate the purportedly universal Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC). The FOFC excludes structures where a head-final projection dominates a head-initial one. In contrast, the present article argues that SFPs in Chinese instantiate C in a three-layered split CP a la Rizzi (1997, 2004) and hence are " visible " for the FOFC. Furthermore, to equate The World Atlas of Language Structures' (WALS) label adverbial subordinator with complementiser as Biberauer et al. (2008, 2009) do is shown to be problematic, given that it turns out to be a cover term for different categories. Accordingly, WALS' results for the distribution of adverbial subor-dinator cannot be mechanically used as testing ground for the predictions made by the FOFC for the category C.