earticle

영어

This article, focusing on topics in Chinese, begins with the definition of topic. There are three major views about the relation between topic and reference 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 definite and indefinite Topic exist in Chinese as separate pragmatics rule.