A Study Of Nazhi 's Topic

Topic phenomenon has been a hot content of modern linguistics research over the decades. As Li&Thompson proposed general typology for topics, he divided language into four types—with stress on topic(such as Chinese, Lisu Language and Lahu Language), with equal stress on subject and topic(such as Japanese), no stress on both subject and topic(such as Filipino), and with stress on subject(such as English), based on the question of “subject or topic is more important to the sentence”. The scholars in later generations basically all agree this division. Based on the research by Li&Thompson, Xu Liejiong and Liu Danqing made a bold attempt by adopting Chomsky’s general transmission theory to consider Chinese as a grammaticalized syntactic constituent, and in combination of some modern research results in linguistics, making an analysis on the structure and functions of topics.Naxi Language also contains topic sentences like Chinese and Suli Language.After analyzing Xu Jionglie and Liu Danqing’s topic theory, the thesis takes Naxi Language as example located in Qiyi Street of Dayan Township, Gucheng District of Yunnan’s Lijiang City, and makes a definition of Naxi topic sentences from the angle of function, and then makes a deep exploration of the language and topic sentence from the aspects of the scope, characteristics, Modal words and the features of typology.The first chapter is the part of introduction. It mainly introduces the recent research conditions of Sino-Tibetan topic sentence, research significance, theory methods and linguistic data source.Chapter two focuses on the introduction of Naxi Nationality and language, and induces Naxi language voice system in Dayan Township.Chapter three makes an analysis on the basic structure and features of Naxi topic sentence, including the constituents suitable to act as topics, and at the same times introduces the definitions of Naxi language main ttopic, sub-topic and minor sub-topic.In chapter four it describes four types of Naxi language topic judged from thesemantics—register topic sentence, splitting topic sentence, and copy type topic sentence.Chapter five, on one hand, concentrates on analyzing the marks of Naxi topic,the marks including topic pause mark in a generalized sense, and topic Modal words;and on the other describes some common topic marks in Naxi oral language and analyzes the sources of the marks.Chapter six mainly discusses the relation between topic words in Naxi Language and several referential categories, and finds that fixed constituents act as topic the most frequently in Naxi language, and non-fixed constituents can play the role only in specific conditions. In addition, generic reference can also be seen as Naxi language topic.Naxi language topic sentence is analyzed in term of its function in chapter seven which mainly discusses the core function, information function and comparative function of Naxi language topic.Chapter eight is the part mainly analyzing the grammaticalization of Naxi language topic, and the relations of Naxi language topic sentence and Naxi language passive sentence, existential sentence and judgment sentence.Chapter nine is the part of conclusion. Besides summarizing the whole thesis, it also makes a simple comparison between Naxi language topic sentence and the topic sentences of other languages in Sino-Tibetan system, and points out the defects of the thesis and the future research direction.