A Comparative Study Of Subject And Topic In Chinese And Korean

The subject and the topic are two important concepts of the grammatical studies in the Chinese and Korean languages, thus they have constantly gained attention in the academic world. Fruitful results have been attained by scholars researching from distinctive perspectives and applying different theories and methodologies. Currently, the research focus is whether the subject is different from the topic, and there are many questions to be further discussed. Xu Jie (2001,2003) pointed out that the topic is a distinctive grammatical category from the subject. Based on this idea, this dissertation aims to re-examine and analyze the grammatical issues such as the subject and the topic in Chinese and Korea, the differentiation of the subject and the topic, the subject ellipsis, the topic markers, the topicalization of the syntactic components.The conclusions are summarized as the following through a comparison of the subject and the topic in Chinese and Korean.1. Chinese has no syntactic markers to differentiate the subject and the topic, thus it is a topic-prominent language. Korean has apparent syntactic markers to distinguish the subject and the topic, thus it is a subject-prominent and topic-prominent language. In Chinese and Korean, the subject is the major component of the sentence and it precedes the predicate. Chinese and Korean both allow subject ellipsis and do not need "dummy subject" as "it" or "there" in English to fill in the subject position. What is different is Chinese does not have the syntactic marker for the subject, and semantically there are no restrictions for the subject, while Korean has the nominative case markers "(?)(i)/(?)(ka)、(?)(kkeyse)" to mark the subject and semantically only the agent can act as the subject. Though the word order of the two languages are different, they share similar topic features. The topic in both languages involves the about-ness of the following theme structure. It occupies the initial position of the sentence, carries the topic markers, denotes the old (known) information and is definite. However, the initial component of Chinese topic structure is often analyzed as the subject, while the topic in Korean is often regarded as the subject, the object or the adverbial.2. The typical subject ellipsis in Chinese and Korean is the forward ellipsis and the backward ellipsis. The forward ellipsis is a continuation of the established topic, and by no doubt it is more economical. Therefore, the subject ellipsis is mostly forward ellipsis, while the backward ellipsis is not common to see. According to the types of the omitted components in a sentence, the forward ellipsis can be categorized as the subject forward ellipsis, the object forward ellipsis, the attributive forward ellipsis, with the subject forward ellipsis as the typical elliptical construction. Chinese has basically no morphological changes, and thus emphasizes more the pragmatic effects. Based on the contextual information, Chinese often omits words with unnecessary information and retains the words expressing the necessary information. Compared with Chinese, the subject ellipsis in Korean is more flexible and more frequently used. The subject ellipsis in Korean is closely related with the morphological features of the predicate. The subject can be dropped once the morphological features of the predicate can help determine the subject. The subject can also be omitted under certain pragmatic or contextual situations. We hold that the discussion of the subject ellipsis in Chinese and Korean cannot be constrained to sentences, it should be also extended to the context because the context can help differentiate the forward ellipsis and the backward ellipsis.3. In the Chinese and Korean topic constructions, the topic usually occupies the initial position of the sentence. Since Chinese does not mark the topics, the identification of the topic depends largely on its word order. However, the situation in the Korean topic is different, Korean topics are mostly marked, the unmarked topics are only constrained to topics which can be identified in the context. In a broad sentence, the word order and the pause can be regarded as the grammatical means to mark Chinese topics. In a narrow sense, only the particles "a, ma, ba, ne" and the prepositions "guanyu, zhiyu, duiyu" can also be considered as topic markers. In some Chinese topic constructions, the particles and the prepositions can co-occur to mark the topic. Since the particles carry modality, they are subject to the constraints when co-occurring with the prepositions. Apart from the word order and the pause, the Korean topic markers also include a designated marker "(?)(nun)". It is often highly used in Korean topic constructions to denote the topic or the contrast. In the process of the topicalization, if "(?)-(nun)" is used in the subject or the object position, the nominative or accusative case marker has to be deleted. In this case,"(?)(nun)" seems also to mark the case, but this is not true. Though "(?)(nun)" can not co-occur the nominative or accusative case marker, it can co-occur with local case marker, the dative case marker, and the comitative case marker. This shows that "(?)(nun)" has nothing to do with the case, only case makers denote the case.4. The topic construction in Chinese and Korean is realized through movement. The topicalization of certain syntactic components is a process of the movement of the components to the initial position of the sentence. No movement, backward movement or the movement not to the initial position cannot generate the topic construction. If the movement of the object is a process of topicalization, it means that the object which does not originally denote the topic acquires the function of denoting the topic because it is moved to the position which denotes the topic. This position, syntactically, is the sentence-initial position. Though the topic in Chinese and English occupies the same position, the topic in Korean can only be analyzed as the preposed object instead of the subject, thus the sentence undergoing the topicalization is called "the topicalized sentence". This is quite different from Chinese as in Chinese the preposed component is regarded as the subject, and the whole sentence is often called "the double subject sentence".