A Book Report on Topics and Topic Comment Constructions in Chinese
Topic comment construction has been one of the most heated issues in the study of Chinese. This article, focusing on topics in Chinese, begins with the definition of topic. There are three major views about the relation between topic and subject in Chinese.
The traditional view takes subject-predicate as the fundamental relationship between VP and pre-verbal NP(s) and topic is not part of the sentence structure.
The second approach claims that information structures rather than syntactic structures are utilized in Chinese to convey information and the only categories grammaticalized in Chinese are topic and focus.
The third argument, the most popular one, holds that both topic and subject exist in Chinese as separate categories. However, there is no consensus on the definition of topic. A common practice is to determine whether a given pre-verbal NP is a topic or a subject according to their properties. Li & Thompson and Tsao, for instance, have listed a series of properties of topic. However, it turns out unreasonable to use properties as the definition for topic, because many properties are so general that other elements in a Chinese sentence, 昨天 in 小張我昨天見(jiàn)過(guò), for instance, could have them as well. An alternative approach tries to establish a structural relation between topic and verb, but fails to account for the semantic and discourse properties. Different from all this, the author, incorporating both syntactic relation and discourse factors, defines a topic as an unmarked NP that precedes a clause and is related to a position inside the clause; it represents an entity which has been mentioned in the previous discourse and is being discussed again in the current sentence.