The Contrastive Pragmatics Of Topics--Chinese Vs. English

It is often observed that Chinese learners of English manifest strong transfer of topic-comment constructions in the use of English. This phenomenon, as believed by many linguists, owns its root cause to that Chinese is a topic- prominent language while English is a subject-prominent language. However, typological difference might not be the only explanation. Topic-comment constructions may not be a problem of grammaticality in English, but in the pragmatic sense, the overuse of it may be proved inappropriate or unacceptable to the native speakers of English. This is because the use of topic structures is subject to pragmatic constraints. The topics thus used must imply speakers? intentions. Therefore, we will try to figure out, in English and Chinese respectively, what types of topics are frequently used on what occasions. And endeavors will be made to find out the differences that exist and similarities shared between the two languages, to categorize them with pragmatic devices instead of syntactic ones. And their pragmatic forces in the sequencing of turn taking will also be examined. One more point that needs to clarify is that this thesis will mainly focus on those topic constructions in which the topic does not coincide with the subject. Oral data collected from conversations of Chinese and English will be the sources to account for the central claim that will be put forth later. Implications for foreign language teaching can be expected to draw from the analysis of the present study, in the hope that we can help to enhance the learners? pragmatic awareness in their language performances.