A Comparative Study Of Topic Sentences In Ancient And Modern Chinese

Li、Thompson (1976,1981) have divided world’languages into subject-prominence languages and topic-prominence languages. They suppose that Chinese is the typical topic-prominence language, while English is the representative subject-prominence language. Since that, articles about "topic" in Chinese have been springing, which reflects that many scholars are interested in the issue of "topic". Meanwhile, lots of divergences have emerged among these scholars, some of whom suspect that whether Chinese can be the so-called topic-prominence language and how to accurately define the concept of topic in Chinese. Besides, most scholars have focused on "topic" in modern Chinese over these nearly30years; the ancient Chinese, however, has attracted few scholars, and the very few articles and books put their attention on topic’s function of cohesion in textual linguistics. In our thesis, we will put emphasis on "topic" in the range of one-sentence and discuss types of topic sentences, anaphora forms and topic markers in ancient Chinese by virtue of texts in pre-Qin Dynasty. Moreover, we’ll contrast them by those in modern Chinese in order to find the universals and discrepancies between them. Our thesis involves these eight chapters:§1. Introduce the meaning of choosing this subject and current situation on "topic" research. Explain the relevant concepts and terms. Illustrate the theoretical basis、method and texts.§2. Introduce the varied definition of "topic" from different linguistic schools and make an appropriate comment on them. Explain the reasons why there are so many different kinds of definition on "topic". Attempt to come up with my own definition on "topic".§3.Respectively discuss topic sentences in modern Chinese and ancient Chinese. Find characteristics of ancient-modern topic sentences and discover differences between them. Moreover, try to explain the reasons why there exist these discrepancies.§4. Introduce some topic markers of topic sentences in ancient-modern Chinese. Summarize and contrast the function of these topic markers. Attempt to discover the universals and diversities.§5. In light of existing achievements in modern Chinese topic sentences, investigate the semantic type of topic sentences in ancient Chinese. Contrast the semantic type of ancient Chinese topic sentences with that of modern Chinese topic sentences, and find the corresponding relationship between them.§6. Respectively discuss the constraints of ancient-modern Chinese topic sentences on anaphora forms. Adequately describe and explain the differences in choosing anaphora forms between ancient Chinese and modern Chinese.§7. The phenomenon that there exist topic sentences in ancient Chinese has proved that the bud of topic structure has already generated.Of course, we have to do more in collecting and analyzing data if we want to prove that the topic structure has become a kind of stable construction in ancient Chinese.§8. In the summary, we will introduce the conclusion and innovation of this subject; however, some inadequacies are inevitable.This thesis is only said to be a preliminary attempt on the road of studying topic sentences in ancient Chinese. In the thesis, we propose some opinions, which need to be further investigated. During the period of writing thesis, we discover that some concepts in modern linguistics can also be applied to ancient Chinese. Language has experienced lots of changes from ancient to now.On one hand,languages have always been developing,and these changes are the outer manifestation of this development,on the other hand,"heritable genes" exist in ancient-modern Chinese.If we observe from the perspective of modern linguistic, we’ll find so many similarities between them! Contrastively observe these similarities and differences, and we will have a profound understanding in recognizing languages.