A Study On The Topic Sentences In Chao Ye Qian Zai

“Topic” is an important concept in contemporary linguistics.In the ancient and modern Chinese,It is a common phenomenon.Currently,lots of research has focused on the research of topic in the modern Chinese literature,however,less efforts have been made to explore topic in the ancient Chinese literature.Thus,the aim of this research is to identify the characteristics of topic sentence in ancient period by analyzing the basic appearance of the topic sentence in “Chao Ye Qian Zai” and comparing it with the materials in the early and the same periods.According to a comprehensive literature review,“Topic” is a syntactic concept,which occupies a syntactic position in asyntactic structure.Based on the structural form of “Topic”,this present research divided the general topic sentences in “Chao Ye Qian Zai” into six categories,including noun structure as topic,verb as topic,pronoun as topic,centering structure as topic,subject-verb structure as topic,and clause as topic.Among them,the sentences of noun structure as topic has the most.In addition,there is a unique structure of topic sentences in “Chao Ye Qian Zai”-the topic sentences of verb “You”,which also has a large proportion.The analysis results show that the verb “you” has a function of introducing “topic”,particularly,it can introduce amorphous components as “topic”.Also,the topic sentences of verb “You”usually appears in bi-constituent sentences.“Topic” tends to have some sort of markers.There are diverse topic markers in the topic sentences in “Chao Ye Qian Zai”,such as word order,pause,prompt-pause word and topic makers of syntactic structure.Different from Chinese in other periods,there are only three kinds of teton words,such as “zhe”,“ye” and “you”.From the perspective of semantic types of topic sentences,“Chao Ye Qian Zai”mainly contains topic sentences of argument-coreference and register topic sentences.The most topics in topic sentences of argument-coreference are that uesd as agent.The number of patient topic is small and this is different from Old Chinese.Among register topic sentences are mainly temporal-spatial topic sentences.Comparing with Old Chinese,the forms of temporal-spatial topic sentences are more flexible and diverse.