On The Text Topic Of Modern Chinese

This paper discusses the text topics, which is a study based on the different style (spoken and written) Chinese text corpora. It outlines my definition of text topic, analyzes the structure of Chinese text and describes the different syntactic forms and anaphora forms of the nominal text topic, and we have given the explanations to the differences existing in the different style Chinese text topic. One part of this paper attempts a psycholinguistic case study, with the Verbal Protocol method, into the cognitive process of identification of Chinese text hidden-topic. This thesis is composed of five parts together with the introduction and conclusion.Chapter One is an introduction. It includes some interpretations of "topic" and similar terms, such as "subject" and "theme" and it offers some reviews of the current situation of "topic" research made by scholars of this field home and abroad. Finally, we give some explanations to the related issues and the structure of this thesis.Chapter Two outlines my definition of text topic and analyzes the structure of Chinese text. It shows that topic is originally used as a pragmatic conception and it is a category of semantic level. Clause is the basic unit in Chinese text, because it reflects the fact that phrase is the syntactic component of Chinese text and tells us that how sentence factor (sometimes, sentence factor is the text factor) is used in the performance of pragmatic layer. As an initial conception, topic has text features. We find that text topic as a central conception expressed by speakers is the soul of text.Chapter Three presents a careful comparison of the different syntactic forms and anaphora forms of the nominal text topic. There is a remarkable contrast between Chinese spoken and written texts. The study shows that nominal topic component used as an object in the Chinese spoken text clause has the maximum frequency while in written text it is used as the subject. The frequency of visible Anaphora is higher than the invisible anaphora and the frequency of nominal anaphora is higher than pronoun anaphora in spoken text. The lighter of the form of nominal topic is, the higher frequency of it has. While the form of pronoun topic is different, the heavier its form is, the higher frequency it has in the spoken text. In Chinese written text, the frequency of pronoun anaphora is much higher than nominal anaphora. The heavier of the form of pronouns topic is, the higher frequency it has. While the form of nominal topic is contrary: the lighter its form is, the higher frequency it has. At the end of this chapter, the differences described above are illustrated respectively with the help of the factors of "distance" and "unity" from the theory of accessibility, together with the description of the different expressing form and spreading media in these two types of texts.Chapter Four deals with the identification of Chinese text hidden-topic, which is studied with a set of cognitive psychology processes. From the case study, we can know that the complexity of verbal protocol reflects the complexity of thinking process of the subjects, which is proportional to the times of using cognitive strategies and the complexity of thinking procedure. The identification of topic is a process of matching text feature information with the feature information stored in the brain. Chinese text comment-clause has the capacity of assignment to text topic. The identification of Chinese text hidden-topic is a process of reorganization the topic according to the features described by the comment-clauses.Chapter Five is the conclusion. It summarizes the main points of this study and points out the shortcomings in this paper. Finally, we raise some issues that need a further study in the future.