The Semantic Functions And Pragmatic Functions Of Topic Markers In Chinese

This dissertation discusses the semantic functions or pragmatic functions of the topic markers in Chinese. Besides the conclusion, it includes seven parts.The first part is the introduction, which deals with three issues:the description of the functions and the characters of the markers; the explanations of some key conceptions, such as topic and discourse topic; and the summarization of the research findings in topic markers.The second part discusses the semantic function of "guanyu" and "duiyu". The function of these two topic markers is to narrow the semantic relationship between the topic and the comment. There are two factors affect the semantic relationship between the topic and the comment, which are the semantic structures of topic sentence, and the semantic features of verbs or noun in comments. This part indicates the conditions, in which "guanyu" and "duiyu" can be used, from which the following regulars are found:the prep "guanyu" often co-exists with saying verbs and content nouns, while the prep "duiyu" often co-exists with psychological verbs and psychological nouns.The third part discusses the discourse function of "zhiyu". The function of "zhiyu" is topic-shift. This paper analyzes the semantic relationship between the original topic and the shifted topic. The two topics should be in the same cognitive domain. There are both universities and individualities among all of the nouns in the same cognitive domain, so when we select one members from the domain, it means that we negate the others. To sum up, the topic which is introduced by the prep "zhiyu" usually consists of the meaning of contrastive.The fourth part discusses the discourse function of "shuodao". The function of "shuodao" is to introduce a discourse topic directly or indirectly. And this part also analyzes sentence topic, discourse topic, and the semantic relationship between the sentence topic and its comment, and then it points out that the topic in discourse should be distinguished into different levels.The fifth part discusses the discourse function of "zaishuo". "Zaishuo" in Chinese should be distinguished into two phrases, one of which is the topic marker, and its function is to change topic by introducing a topic directly. And the other one is the discourse marker, which function is to change topic by changing narrative thread or narrative scene. Both of these two phrases can be used in topic-shift, but there are many differences between them, such as the continuity of topic.The sixth part discusses the co-existing between the pre-posing topics and the modal words in sentence. It has selective relationship between "ba" "ne" and the markers of pre-posing topics. "Ba" only co-exists with "zaishuo", "yaoshuo" "jiushuo" etc, while "ne" only co-exists with "zhiyu", "shuodao". The topic marker "zaishuo", "jiushuo" have the real meanings, which constitute one sentence with the noun phrase used in topic. And these sentences are imperative. So there is no difference between "ba" used as topic marker and used at the end of imperative sentences. The function of the topic marker "ba" is to alleviate the imperative mood. This paper also demonstrates the pragmatic function of "ne" by analyzing discourse functions of "zhiyu" "shuodao"The seventh part discusses the semantic evolutions of topic markers except "guanyu" and "duiyu". It respectively explains the semantic evolution routs of topic markers, and indicates the relations of route, hypothesis, similarity, time and enumeration in semantic evolution.