| Topic, or subject, is a very important concept in modern linguistics and many researchers pay great attention to it. In Linguistic Typology, Chinese is analyzed as a"priority topic"language. So the study of topic is particularly important to Chinese.On the definition of topic, there are many different arguments in the academic field of Common Language. But there is a great difference among them because of the different methods and theories. In this paper, I have not defined topic. I accept the definition of topic expressed in Structure and Function(Xu Liejiong, Liu Danqing 1998): we regard the topic as a concept of the syntactic structures. Topic could mean 1) a specific position in a syntactic structure; 2) words which appear in these positions.Compared with English, Putonghua, as the representative of modern Chinese, lays much attention on topic. But Putonghua is not the most prominent"priority-topic"language in Chinese, which is regarded as the standard common speech and the highest form of the Chinese language. Putonghua has taken great changes in nearly 100 years. Moreover, Putonghua has received lot of influence from Indo-European language. In fact, dialect often inherites the old usage, even before the letter-recorded time. Dialect often conforms to the commonness of human languages than the standard language, which gets effects from the man-made normalization. So I argue that Chinese dialects give much more prominence to the characters of topic language. From the view-point of language typology, this paper investigates the syntax types of the subdialect, Duchanghua of Gan dialect. I argue that Duchanghua, represented in the transitive sentences and small phrases-embedded sentences, is not a typical SVO language but a typical topic language. Duchanghua uses more TV structures with the recipient prior to the topic than Putonghua. This phenomenon takes an absolute advantage in the Interrogative Sentence, Imperative Sentence, Declarative Sentence and Rhetorical question. Contrary to Putonghua, adverbs modifying the restriction verb or adjective is often postposed.I also compare the topic sentence of Putonghua and the topic sentence of Duchang dialect. I lay high stress on the commonness and difference of types, and the topic marking of the topic sentence. From the abundant facts of comparison, the topic sentence of Duchanghua really has commonness with the topic sentence of Putonghua, but has the characters of its own. For example, "qu"("渠") has the nature of special topic double reference, and it has not a similar nature equivalent in Putonghua. In addition, both have a different topic marks. Consequently, Duchanghua in the northern Jiangxi dialect gives more prominence to the characters of the topic sentence than Putonghua.Through to the massive languages material fact inspection research, we discovered all prospers in the dialect, the topic is in the words structure fundamental component, is not is special or the attachment ingredient, thus had proven well "in Chinese topic shifts the production by no means" viewpoint. We also may initially extrapolate that, all prospers the dialect topic sentence performance characteristic possibly widely to exist to the south various dialects (for example Wu dialect) center, with has the difference take the Beijing language as representative's north dialect topic sentence。... |
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