The Study Of Topic In Chinese As A Foreign Language

Topic is an important research in contemporary Chinese, which is about Chinese word order, language type, linguistic psychology of Chinese and so on. This dissertation holds that topic is a pragmatic category, which is influenced by interaction of syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. Topic is still in grammaticalization . It can be concluded that topic is not a syntactic category. Definition, nature, types, topic-markers, functions and grammaticalization of topic are discussed thoroughly in this dissertation. The conclusion is that topic is what the utterance is to be about. Discussion starts from topic, which is usually something specified and known. Topic-comment structure can be classified into five types from semantic relationship. Topic structure reflects that Chinese user establish one background or range before talking. The most central function of the topic is the words function. Complement structure and some common spoken forms are influenced by the topic structure. The study of topic and topic-comment structure is of important theoretical significance and applied value. The study of topic reveals the potentiality of the pragmatic analysis in the study of Chinese grammar. Some teaching plans have been put forward in study of Chinese as a foreign language. The study of topic will help to discover the characteristic of Chinese structure and linguistic psychology of Chinese people, and be useful to teaching Chinese as a foreign language.