Topic Structure In Shaoyang Dialect

Chinese is analyzed as a"topic-prominent"language. There are many different arguments on the definition of topic in the academic field. In this thesis, I adopt the definition of topic defined by Xu Liejiong that the topic is a concept of the syntactic structure.Compared with English, Mandarin Chinese lays much attention on topic. But Mandarin Chinese is not the most"topic-prominent"language if it is compared with the dialects of Chinese. Mandarin Chinese has been under great changes nearly the last 100 years. Instead, dialects often conform to the commonness of human language than the standard language, which gets effects from the man-made normalization. So I argue that Chinese dialects give much prominence to the characters of topic strcture.Mandarin is a gentle SVO whereas dialects in Chinese are stronger than Mandarin Chinese so they are more various in terms of topic structure. I will discuss about the topic structures in Shaoyang dialect from the basic concepts, and compare them with Mandarin Chinese as well as other analyzed dialects, trying to find out the commonness and the differences.In the discussion note, I lay high stress on the different types of topic structure, and the topic marking of the topic sentences. There are already a lot of works have been done on the investigation of topic structure in Chinese dialects, but none has been done in Shaoyang dialect. I will discuss about the topic structure in post-noun phrases, post-quantificational phrases, post-adverbal phrases, post-prepositional phrases, postadverbs, questions. Copying topics and subtopics also will be discussed in the theis. From the abundant facts, topic structure in Shaoyang dialect really has the characters of its own. It seems that we mix syntax with semantics or pragmatics, but we always believe there is no clear boundary among these three concepts. We only divide them for a better understanding.Two approaches to the problem of interpreting utterances are sketched: a structural account at the level of sentence and speech act, and an interactional account of their functions and consequences as constitutive of the social order in which they occur.