A Study Of The Structure Of Semantics In Modern Chinese

Various theories and methods have attempted to elucidate "topic", one of the cutting-edge research, with no agreement on any fundamental questions. Through a historical survey over "structure of the topic-comment", this dissertation found between Gabelentz’s theory of "psychologisches Subject-psychologisches Pradicat"(1881) and B. Malinowski’s theory of semantics and function of discourse and behaviora(1920), its basic points of research:category of discourse function and analysis of semantic structure.As a foremost and systematic account of the research of "structure of the topic-comment" in history, this dissertation, with reference to the research of predecessors, discusses the essential attribute of "topic-comment", and redefines "topic","comment","structure of the topic-comment" and "the sentence of structure of the topic-comment". The research explores discourse structures of Chinese extensively and systematically, following such steps as examination, qualification, and quantification. With reference to the prior study of sentence type, the dissertation discriminates respectively between discourse structure and sentence, sentence pattern and sentence type, and differentiates structural sentence from all the others. On the basis of analysis over large quantity of sentences, the research abstracts a system of functional category of topic-comment, and a matched frame system in its regard. By examining texts of given genres, the research makes a statistical analysis rate of occurrence of topic-comment sentences and their distributive features.The principal conclusions of the research include:1. As the two basic structure of verbal expression, the subject-predicate sentence is the agent-act expression, and the topic-comment sentence is the intent-attention expression;2. defining30first rank and15second rank categories of Chinese topic structure,26first rank and23second rank categories of comment; as for the matched frames of topic-comment function,34first rank frames,37second rank and63actual frames;3. initially indicating that one function of evaluating categories is making descriptive the latent part of sentence, thus making s-v structure into topic-comment structure;4. on the basis of statistical data, initially giving ratios of occurrences of topic-comment sentences:daily colloquial (55.6%)<narrative (61.6%)<argumentative (68%)<exposition (70%); topic-comment sentences occur mainly in description, argumentation, demonstration, expression, comment, evaluation, and s-v sentences occur in narration of behavior. The dissertation, in theory, constructs a theory of topic-comment research, expounds a theory of "Initial-NP Determinism", which is different from "Verb Centrism", that is, the semantic property of NP at the sentence beginning predetermines the tendency of the following semantics and syntax, and the unfolding of the expression of whole sentence. Methodologically, thanks to the theorem of topic and comment, particular-general method, and functional analysis of topic-comment category, the research sets up categorical system of topic-comment function, and by statistical analysis, illuminates the distributive feature and tendency of ratios of occurrences of topic-comment sentences.The theoretical worth of the research resides in broadening the research of topic-comment, partially facilitating the linguistic research of topic-comment in human language, and being heuristic in establishing typology of language structure. The system of functional category of topic-comment, and its matched frame system can offer a hand in the analysis of sentence and text. The result of the research can also offer new theorem or tool, in illustrating features of Chinese language when editing grammar textbook, exemplifying sense of language in CLT, and offering a new tool in formalizing element of syntactic function in information processing in Chinese.