A Typological Study Of The Syntactic Properties Of Topic And Topic Marker

Characterized by the language's topic-prominence nature, study of the word order typology of Chinese should not follow the common practices of English, which is a typical subject-prominent language. The current study examines topic and topic marker within a word order typology framework and proposes taxonomy of the basic constituents of a topic-prominent language. It is found that T (topic) is the basic and core constituent that determines the syntactic nature of Chinese as a topic-prominent language. The study looks at topic as the syntactic head in a topic structure. A topic occupies a specific node in syntactic analysis and could base-generate anywhere in a clause other than the sentence final position. Therefore, a topic sentence, in syntactic studies should be analyzed as a topic phrase marked as TP. A TP consists of a T (as the head) and an IP (as the comment). The study further distinguishes vp-topic, which governs the whole topic chain and VP-topic, which only governs positions within the VP. As for the topic marker, it is proposed that a topic marker can be cliticized to any complete syntactic constituent except for those in the sentence final position. The study also examines the topicalized structures in VO constructions, syntax-semantics mismatched constructions and inner light verb constructions. It also carries out a contrastive analysis of topic sentences across Altaic Languages (including Japonic Languages), Sino-Tibetan Languages, Austronesian Languages and Austro-Asiatic Languages, etc. The detailed cross-linguistic research confirms that topic is a more basic constituent in topic-prominent languages than S and O. The sentence initial position is more topic in nature than subject. A topical analysis can provide us with a more detailed and more enlightening insight into the word order nature of the language.The significance of the current study is that it qualifies topic as a basic syntactic constituent and determines TV as the basic word order of Chinese as a representative of topic-prominent languages. The structural and semantic prominence should be given to topic rather than subject or object. The study endeavours, and avails its dialectal and cross-linguistic research, to contribute to a bigger picture of word order universal study at large.