An Investigation On Topic-prominence In Interlanguage Of Chinese EFL Learners: In Discourse Perspective

Typologically, English and Chinese, belong to different language typological systems respectively. Chinese is topic prominent language whereas English belongs to subject prominent language (Li&Thompson, 1976). Because the impact of the mother tongue on second language acquisition has been widely recognized, the inevitable typological differences between Chinese and English will be reflected in interlanguage of Chinese EFL learners. In second language acquisition research, quite a number of researches have been conducted at home and abroad based on the language typological classification of subject-prominence and topic-prominence. Nevertheless, the previous studies usually explore the TP/SP issue in a pure syntactic way, which ignored the discourse function of the Chinese"topic", and the influence of the key topic structure in Chinese discourse—topic-chain on interlanguage discourse has scarcely been concerned.This current study attempts to step forward on the basis of the previous researches, trying to break through the scope of syntax, and investigates on topic-prominence in interlanguage of Chinese EFL learners from the discourse perspective. In this paper, we selected Topic-chain which is the main topic-prominent structure in Chinese discourse and Zero Anaphora which is the most common topic anaphora in topic-chain as the study goal. Topic structure mainly appears in Chinese discourse in the form of"topic-chain"(Wang 2002, 2004). Actually, when the topic- chain appears, the research on topic structures should go beyond the clauses and sentences and go into the typical range of discourse. Zero Anaphora can only be used in the discourse which contains at least two sentences, and this is why we choose it as our study goal. Different anaphora types are employed in different typological languages. As Chinese is topic-prominent, stressing semantic coherence rather than formal cohesion, whereas English is subject-prominent, Zero Anaphora is used far more frequently in Chinese, while the use of pronominal anaphora is much more common in English(Xu, 1992). This current study is made up of a questionnaire, with discourses of Chinese-English Translation and blank filling. Three groups of Chinese EFL learners of different English proficiency levels(Preliminary level, Intermediate level, Advanced level) were tested. The results and findings were calculated and analyzed.Three important findings were yielded from the present study. First, the characteristics of Chinese topic-chain are transferred to interlanguage of Chinese EFL learners, and result in the overgeneralization of Zero Anaphora; Second, referential distance of zero anaphora is related to the Zero Anaphora transfer, that is the longer the referential distance is, the easier it is to rise to Zero Anaphora transfer; Third, interlanguage discourse of Chinese EFL learners also reflects the characteristics of second language acquisition process from topic-prominence to subject-prominence, and the discourse transfer hypothesis is testified.The findings of the present study contribute to a better understanding of Chinese EFL learners' interlanguage development from topic-prominence to subject-prominence from the perspective of discourse.