The Research On Chinese "Topic"

This paper will start with the concept of the term-"topic", distinguishing several misleading concepts, analyze the relation and difference between "topic" and "subject", and discriminate the divarication in the current research on "topic" in Chinese. The author does not agree with the way of syntax-analyzing that includes not only "subject" but "topic". However, considering the theoretically workability and the inherited attribute of the terms and relevant study, the author advises that we take it into account to preserve the methods of syntax-analyzing in existence. Thus we can view "the topic theory" as a predominating pragmatic tactic in Chinese that can greatly restrict the syntax structure in our discourse. Then this dissertation penetrates into the structure of Chinese "topic" structures, analyzes its definition, characteristics and its classification. This paper, basing on the pragmatic theories of "iconicity", "information focus" and "end focus", puts forward two new concepts-overt topic structure and covert topic structure (the latter is a kind of special existed form of Chinese topic structures), and then tries to probe into the expressing systems of Chinese topic, and reveal its explicit and latent forms and the restricting factors.The author will also discuss the noumenon functions of Chinese topic from three respects: contextual function, semantic function and grammatical function. They correspond respectively to topic's connecting function in a certain context, topic's semantic relationships with other words in the topic structures, and the topic's grammatical operation function of in the sentences. In the last chapter, this dissertation will explore the practical value of "topic" in two aspects, i.e., the problem of the transferring from "topic" to "subject" in Chinese-English translation, and the benefit to Chinese punctuation standardization.