On The Topic And Topic Marking Of Modern Mongolian Language

Topic is an important notion in modern linguistics. There are various of definition of it like viewing as the given information, a start of a conversation or about what is going to say in a sentence and so on. Comment is the content about topic and they compose the " topic-comment " structure marking by topic markers. Through the way of matching option or shifting order will finish the topicalization.This article is based on the former research on topic and uses some basic knowledge of Syntactics, Semantics, Cognitive Linguistics to do the description for modern Mongolian. It tries to illustrate the features, semantic relationships and pragmatic functions of modern Mongolian’s topic and topic markers. The examples in this article are from two of the modern Mongolian literary works "(?)" and "(?)" to exemplify the usage of topic and topic markers. This article includes six parts.The former part is a brief introduction about the research profile of topic in Chinese, English, some domestic minority languages and Mongolian. At the same time introduce the purpose, meaning and method to this article.Chapter one does a description of "topic-comment" structure and analyzes the components being topic in syntactic constituent and grammatical unit. Subject, object, adverbial can be topic in terms of syntactic constituent and word, phrase, sub-clause can be topic in terms of grammatical unit.Chapter two analyzes the modern Mongolian topic markers. They are pause, "(?)", "(?)", "(?)", "(?) " and "(?)" and analyzes their usage. In this part it also exemplifies the way of topicalization which are matching option and shifting order.Chapter three analyzes the semantic relationship due to the relation between topic and some part of comment. It can be divided into four categories that the same argument topic, language domain topic, copy type topic and sub-clause topic.Chapter four discusses the pragmatic functions of topic and topic markers in modern Mongolian. Topic has the functions that determining the center of conversation, providing the former information, connecting the contents and highlighting the key point of conversation; topic markers can stress the topic and emphasize the topic. Different topic marker has its unique semantic and pragmatic functions.The last part is the conclusion which summarizes the main contents and viewpoints of the whole thesis and points out the imperfections and some points still need to study further.