A Study On The Means Of Topic Marking In Bai Language

Topic is an important concept in modern linguistics,and has become a hot research subject of linguistics.Bai people is an ancient ethnic in southwest of China.Bai language belong to the Tibeto-Burman Group of the Sino-Tibetan Language Family,its language branch is undefined.Bai language has theme-rheme structure and belongs to topic prominent language.On the basis of other's researches and natural discourse analysis,and taking advantage as a Bai language southern dialect native speaker.I analyze the referential features of topic and the marking methods of topic,discussing the similarities and differences of topic marker by contrasting,founding the similarities and differences between Bai language and languages of the Yi branch.This thesis is divided into five parts:The first part is introduction.Introducing the significance,research object,research methods and corpus collection process;describing the current status of the topic research on Chinese and minority languages,especially on Bai language;defining define topic concept of this article through inducing common topic concepts.The second part analyzes referential features and defines marking methods of Topic.Analyzing the referential features of Bai language,concluding that topic in Bai Language is definite in general and has more exclusion on indefinite,but indefinite constituent can be topic in under certain conditions.Defining the concept of marking methods of Topic in Bai language,concluding that topic can be marked by word order and topic marker in Bai language.The third part discusses the characteristics and functions of word order mark the topic.The word order not only can be non-marked that is fixed because pragmatic use,but also can be marked by the movement of object.The forth part analyzes and compares three grammatical topic marker:(?),ts(?)33,n?55 in Bai language Dali dialect,and summarize their characteristics and functions,as well as their similarities and differences.Concluding that n?55 is a dedicated topic marker because its original function is more singleness,(?)and(?)are combined topic marker because they have various original function.Their markup elements are roughly identical,but their specific markup elements and strength of mood have difference.They all can mark imperative and exclamatory sentences,but not all of them can mark declarative and interrogative sentences.It is differences when they include hypothetical semanteme and specific tone.n?55 and(?)are more frequently used to mark contrast topic.In addition,they have some other special semanteme.The fifth part compare Bai language with languages of the Yi branch,discuss the similarities and differences when word order and topic marker as the methods of marking topic between Bai language,Yi language,Hani language,Lahu language.Four languages all can mark topic through word order,and subject can add accusative particle after shift.Although there is no phonetic corresponding between their topic marker,they have many similarities in function.