Study On The Status Of Chinese Topic As A Syntactic Constituent

This paper deals with topic in Chinese.Unlike Indo-European languages,Chinese doesn't have morphological variation to show those categorical meaning of syntactic elements,such as subject and predicate.This makes it difficult to identify the status of topic and thus brings much controversy when the structure of a sentence is analyzed.This research aims at identifying the syntactic status of Chinese topic from a new perspective and then specifying the relationship between topic and subject.The paper starts with the concept-"topic",distinguishing several misleading concepts.In terms of the relationship between topic and subject,there are three perspectives.The structural linguists hold that the notion of topic is equivalent to subject.The functional school claims that subject operates on the syntactic level while topic functions on the pragmatic level.They function on different levels.The formalist school argues that topic should be identified as an unmarked element in a sentence.It should enjoy the same syntactic status with subject and object. Topic and subject can be identical or coexist in a single sentence.The paper reviews these three perspectives,discusses the relationship between discourse and syntax and indicates that discourse grammar precedes syntax.In other words,syntactic elements can be the result of syntacticization of discourse elements.Topic,identified as a syntactic constituent of a Chinese sentence is also grammaticalized from a discourse constituent.Then the paper analyzes the features of Chinese topic and subject respectively.The syntactic categories that can enter into topic position are various.There can be more than one topic in a single sentence.Topic may extend its semantic domain to a couple of clauses.For subject,a semantic selective restriction between subject and verb exists.The noun phrase that serves as subject can be definite or indefinite.At last,subject can be focused by means ofshi or questioned by means of interrogative pronouns.The paper believes that the degree of grammaticalization of topic in Chinese is far higher than that of Chinese subject.What's more,the relationship between Chinese topic and subject is constitutive rather than realization.The investigation on Chinese topic construction can account for many specific sentence constructions in sentence analysis.It helps explore how a Chinese text is organized and sheds light on the characteristics of Chinese sentence order.At the same time,the identification of topic facilitates the understanding of Chinese subject.