The Structure And Function Of Topic In Oral Chongqing Dialect

Topic is one of the most important issues in linguistic study which is discussedfrom both syntactic and functional perspectives. From the functional perspective,topic is concerned with old information, the beginning of a sentence, and theaboutness of a sentence. From the syntactic perspective, topic can be defined as theinitial part of a sentence, and the sentence order is an important way for topicalization.In regard to the topic in Chinese, Chao Yen-Ren treats the subject in Chinese asthe topic, but Li and Thompson treat Chinese as topic-prominent language whileEnglish as subject-prominent language. Xu Lie-jiong and Liu Dan-qing also seeChinese as topic-prominent language, and base their syntactic definition of topic onthe analysis about Shanghai dialect. According to their definition, topic has become agrammaticalized syntactic element in Chinese sentence structure, which can bedefined as main topic, subtopic, and sub-subtopic due to their different structuralpositions. Xu and Liu’s definition on topic has made great contribution to thesystematic study on Chinese topic structure, especially on the topic structure ofChinese dialect. However, their definition of main topic, subtopic, and sub-subtopicalso leads to syntactically ambiguous sentence, and this makes Yuan Yu-lin wonderwhether this kind of ambiguity comes from the sentence structure itself or thedefinition. Therefore Yuan Yu-lin wonders about the necessity of such a syntacticdefinition and suggests defining topic as a functional element. Shi Yu-zhi also treatssubject as a syntactic element while topic as a functional element and thinks thatsubject is one of those syntactic elements which can realize topic function. Besides,Shi treats topic as unmarked and marked according to different syntactic formsrequired for the realization of topical function.To solve the problems caused by different definitions on topic, this paper firstgives an analysis to Xu Lie-jiong and Liu Danqing’s definition of topic, and thengives a functional definition to topic and treats topic as unmarked and markedaccording to different syntactic elements functioning as topic. Based on this new definition of topic, this paper gives a detailed analysis to the syntactic elements whichfunction as topic in oral Chongqing dialect. The study on topic in this paper is basedon a corpus of oral Chongqing dialect, which has about50669Chinese characters.Since some unique words in oral Chongqing dialect can be used both as topic markerand as mood word, this paper gives a statistical analysis to their actual use in daily life,to see whether the speakers’ sex and age cause differences in the use of these words.In the following chapter, this paper discusses the main functions of topic inChongqing dialect and the relationship between several topics in one sentence. Alsoare discussed in this paper the grammaticalization of topic in Chinese, the topicstructure of the “ba” sentence in Chinese, and the reference of topic. By discussing thefunctional definition of topic in Chinese and analyzing how the syntactic elements inoral Chongqing dialect function as topic, this paper aims to provide a systematicinsight for the study of both topic in Chinese and oral Chongqing dialect.