Study Of Topics And Topicalized Structure In Mandarin From The Perspective Of Lexical-functional Grammar

The thesis aims to study the sentential noun phrases(NPs)and the topicalized structure in which they are incorporated in Mandarin,taking Lexical-functional Grammar(LFG)as the theoretical framework.NP has been a very important grammatical category in the study of languages and studies of NPs cannot be detached from the topicalized structures.The syntactic study of NPs in modern Chinese can be traced back to Ma Shi Wen Tong,written by Ma Jianzhong in 1898 in which there is a specific study of NPs.And it was Yuen Ren Chao who explicitly regarded sentence-initial noun phrases as topics.In A Grammar of Spoken Chinese published in 1962,he proposed that the study of subject and predicate be transformed to the study of topic and comment,which emphasized the topicalized function of sentence-initial noun phrases in spoken Chinese.In 1976,Li & Thompson made a distinction between topic-prominent language and subject-prominent language from the perspective of typology,and Chinese is classified into the former type,which aroused the interests of the scholars both at home and abroad in the studies of topicalized structure in Mandarin.A lot of researches on noun phrases in Mandarin have been done by scholars both in China and abroad.However,some important problems concerning it still remain unsettled.Due to the limitation of the thesis,only the NP+NP+VP construction in Mandarin will be focused on in it.According to the argumentative relationship between NPs and the predicates in the matrix clause,sentence-initial NPs are divided into two types on pragmatic basis: sentence-initial argumentative topic(SAT)and sentence-initial non-argumentative topic(SNAT).Even though the two kinds of construction are very similar in surperfacial forms,they have been treated differently in their syntactic description and explanation.Questions concerning sentence-initial topicalized noun phrases can not be avoided as to how to distinguish topic and subject and how they are derived.As for the first question,it is contended in this thesis that subject be a syntactic notion while topic a pragmatic concept.When it comes to the derivation of topicalized structure in the theoretical framework of traditional TG grammar,some researchers argue for the movement hypothesis,some are in favor of base generation while others think that the the two ways of generation coexist.Different from the hypothesis in the traditional transformational grammar,the position of no movement and no base generation is adopted according to the theory postulated in Lexical-functional Grammar.Thus the topicalized structures will be described and explained from a comparatively novel perspective based on the mappings between f-structure and c-structure.Besides,due to the aboutness of topics,the discussion of topic markers,especially preposition will not be avoided.After the detailed discussion on the difference between subject and topic,the generation of the topicalized NPs and topic markers,some other questions are discussed including the nature of sentence-initial NPs,the interaction betweem long-distance dependency,functional structure and functional uncertainty,and sentence-initial non-argumentative topic and the topicalized structure in which verbless structure and dangling topicalized structures are especially involved.The conclusion of our thesis is the theory of Lexical-functional Grammar is more suitable for the studies of non-configurational language including Mandarin.Majority of examples in the thesis are chosen from modern Chinese,and a small part from ancient Chinese,Japanese,Korean,Russian,Hebrew and Guarani.Part of examples of modern and ancient Chinese are selected from some literature works,others mainly from the corpus by Chinese linguistics research center of Peking Univiversity,and some from the papers published in international journals.The thesis will contribute a lot to the study of Mandarin in the following aspects:(1)The introduction of LFG to the studies of Mandarin will enrich the theoretical framework in addition to the predominant Transformational Generative Grammar in formal linguistics and the Systematical Functional Grammar in functional linguistics.(2)According to our analysis in LFG,topic is not the sub-category required by the PRED value in the clauses,which provides theoretical foundation and support for the argument that it is not well grounded that Mandarin should be regarded as a topic-prominent language.(3)In this thesis,the REFERENCE attribute is designed for the topicalized NPs with discourse functions in f-structure,which not only avoids the dispute of the generation of such kind of structures,but indicates the relationship between subject and topic.(4)According to LFG,constituent structure may not follow the strict binary division for all languages proposed by the trandinational generative grammar.Compared with the binary division,trinary division and fournary division may be more suitable to the study of Mandarin to indicate its complexity fully.(5)In the discussion of functional uncertainty of topicalized structures,Principle of Bottom Uniqueness is hypothesized,that is,the bottom of topicalized structures can not be shared in clauses,but can form a referential control relationship with the constituents in them.