AbstractWe argue that the contrastive dislocation to the low peripheral position in Mandarin Chinese does not target phrase markers, like TopicP or FocusP, contra recent proposals that attempt to extend the cartographic theory to the lowIP‐area. We argue that such dislocations are best analyzed asPFmovements, which display the total reconstruction effect and do not affect theLFinterface. We show that the contrastive dislocation to the low periphery in Mandarin Chinese is subject to the samePFlicensing condition found in the Object Shift construction in Scandinavian. Our analysis thus claims that the low periphery is not a part of the narrow syntax (unlike the left periphery). The templatic nature of the low periphery explains why it is more restricted across languages and is prone to linguistic variation.