A Study On New Branch Topic Structure Of Written Output Of Chinese Second Language Learners: Based On Theory Of NT Structure

In the field of International Chinese teaching,previous studies of the continuation and transformation of topics across sentences are mostly based on the theory of anaphora and ellipsis,which root in ontology research and teaching experience,to explore the discourse cohesion and coherence.Yet this research is based on the Theory of NT Structure and concentrates on the so called New branch topic structure in the written output of Chinese second language learners（CSL）,in order to investigate their capacity of text organization and the influencing factors.In this study,the corpus of CSL（about 240,000 characters）,as well as the native speakers（NS）（about 75,000 characters）is set up and annotated for the research goal,while the mother-tongue of CSL,second language proficiency and narrative/argumentative style are introduced as variables.This research finds that:First,compared with NSs,CSLs use the new branch topic structure less frequently.Although it accounts for a small proportion of the entire text,the errors related to new branch topic structure appear more frequently when they are compared with the overall error rate.This shows that the structure of the new branch is a difficulty in the text organization of for CSLs.Second,with the improvement of the language proficiency of the CSL,the proportion of the output of the new branch structure is increasing,but their error rate is decreasing.CSLs whose native language is subject-prominent produce a higher proportion of new branch structure than those whose native language is topic-prominent,and the error rate of the former is lower.The latter is more prone to the error of naming loss.The proportion of new branch structure in the CSL corpus of argumentative style is higher than that of narrative style,which is contrary to the data of the NS corpus;and the error rate of the narrative style corpus is higher.Statistics show that,the more new branch structure the CSL produce,the lower its error rate remains.Third,modifiers of attributive structure work as naming of the new branch,which is rarely found in the NS corpus.The error rate of this type is high,but some are acceptable;compared with the NS corpus,the frequency of new branch induced by verbs in CSL corpus is lower,and the error rate is higher than that of other types.In addition,the most common types of NT clauses in the CSL corpus are produced as supplementary explanations.The depth scale of NT clause of CSL corpus does not exceed 2.And there are some sentences that violates the impenetrability of name-telling structure,some of which are acceptable in terms of language sense,and the other part is classified as a type of error.This indicates that the new branch topic structure in the Chinese interlanguage presents different characteristics from the mother tongue,and the structure complexity is lower.Based on the corpus,this paper focuses on the output of new branch topic structure of CSL,which enriches the research perspective and is of great significance for promoting the text teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.Meanwhile,it verifies the universality of the interpretation of NT Structure Theory based on the linguistic facts of interlanguage.