An Investigation On Topic Prominence In Chinese-English Interlanguage

Typologically, Chinese is topic prominent language whereas English belongs to subject prominent language. Such dichotomy gives rise to the two competing ideas upon the role of topic prominence in English learning by learners with Chinese as NL. One claims that topic prominence is linguistic universal, the acquisition of which has nothing with the learners' native language background. In contrast, another insists that the typology of topic prominence is concerned with language transfer and decreases its occurrence with the improvement of English proficiency level. However, both claims need more empirical evidence for further verification, since the source and the development of topic prominence were largely investigated as unity by most existing studies and the difference between subcategorial topic prominent properties was ignoredBased on linguistic categorization and typological comparison between the topic and subject in Chinese and English, Chinese topic prominent properties were identified in this study upon six dimensions, which includes Double Subjects Construction, Existential Construction, Null Elements Construction, Semantic Passive Construction, Specificity Marking and Subject-verb Agreement.An empirical study was further carried out to investigate the reason and development pattern of each topic prominent property. With the help of English writing task and grammaticality acceptability judgment task, 120 subjects either from English major or non-English major were divided into four groups (Preliminary level, Intermediate level, Pre-advanced level and Advanced level) according to their English proficiency level. The results and findings were calculated and analyzed.Three important findings were yielded from the present study. First, most topic prominent properties are related to the language transfer, but lack of L2 knowledge and language pragmatic universal also take effect independently or collectively with language transfer in the appearances of some topic prominent ones. Second, witha the growth of English proficiency level in Chinese learners, most topic prominent properties in Chinese learners interlangauge show a gradual declining tendency but are fossilized at the higher level. Third, other topic prominent properties have their own unique development patterns.The results of the present study are significant for the English teaching in China. The language teacher should enhance the typological comparison between Chinese and English so that the learners could be more aware of the difference between native language and target language. Accordingly, the errors and inappropriacy concerned could be avoided.