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29.1 Topic and Topic Prominence 29.1 Topic and Topic Prominence
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29.2 Some Properties of Chinese Topic Structures 29.2 Some Properties of Chinese Topic Structures
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29.3 English-Style Topic Structures in Chinese 29.3 English-Style Topic Structures in Chinese
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29.4 Chinese-Style Topic Structures 29.4 Chinese-Style Topic Structures
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29.5 Structures with a Range Topic 29.5 Structures with a Range Topic
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Notes Notes
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References References
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29 Topic Prominence
Get accessXu, Liejiong (徐烈炯) was Professor (Chair) of Linguistics at City University of Hong Kong and a professor at Fudan University. He is now a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto. He specializes in syntax and semantics and has published several influential papers in renowned journals such as Language, Linguistic Inquiry, Lingua, and Journal of Chinese Linguistics.
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Published:05 May 2015
Cite
Abstract
The Chinese language is often cited as a representative of topic-prominent languages in contrast to subject-prominent languages, and topic prominence is often regarded as one of the characteristic properties of Chinese sentences. Topic constructions in Chinese share a number of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties with those in other languages, but they distinguish themselves in their structural variation and frequent occurrence. Some of them are known as Chinese-style topic structures. Furthermore, there are structures in which the topic is semantically related to the comment clause as a whole but not to a particular expression in it. In some cases it provides the spatial, temporal, and individual frame within which the proposition holds true. Researchers have made different proposals about the formation and interpretation of the various topic structures in Chinese. For at least twenty-five years, topic prominence has been one of the hottest issues in the study of Chinese grammar.
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