A Study On Common Prepositive And Postpositive Topic Markers In Xinhua Dialect Of Hunan Province

Topic plays an important role in the research in Chinese language,and the topic marker,as formal means to highlight topics,also have the significant research value.Through the literature review,we find that there are many related researches in Chinese topic markers,but few systematic researches on topic markers of Xinhua dialect.Therefore,based on previous researches and combined with the data of multiple languages,the thesis investigates the common topic markers"yige","nige","dou"and"lai"in Xinhua dialect from the perspectives of syntactic distribution,function,origin and subsequent evolution,co-occurrence and distribution differences,so as to provide a relatively systematic study of topic markers in Xinhua dialect and give a new dialect reference for the study of Chinese topic markers.This thesis mainly consists of five chapters:The first chapter basically introduces the concept of topic and topic marker,the related research status of topic markers and Xinhua dialect.It also gives a brief introduction of the Emergent Grammar Theory,Adaptation Theory and Grammaticalization Theory adopted in this thesis.The chapter shows the source of linguistic data and the meaning of related symbols in the end.The second chapter defines the nature of prepositional topic markers"yige"and"nige"and analyzes their syntactic distributions and their functions.Firstly,the chapter defines"yige"and"nige",which have the function of highlighting topic in Xinhua dialect,as topic markers,and then investigate their syntactic distributions from three aspects:the types of topic they can mark,the distributions of sentence types and the usage in atypical topic structures.Our findings show that"yige"and"nige"can be used to mark nominal topics,predicative topics and clause topics,and can be distributed in four major sentence categories:declarative sentence,interrogative sentence,exclamatory sentence and imperative sentence,without sentence category restrictions.They can also be used to mark atypical topics in the structure with a patient subtopic,the structure with cleft arguments,the identical topic structure,and the translocation topic structure.Finally,this chapter analyzes the functions of topic marker"yige"and"nige":the information function and discourse function.The third chapter defines the nature of postposition topic markers"dou"and"lai"and analyzes their syntactic distributions and functions.Similarly,this chapter defines the nature of topic marker"dou"and"lai"at first,and then investigates their syntactic distributions.Our research indicates that both of them can mark nominal topics,predicative topics,prepositional phrase topics and clause topics."Dou"can appear in four major sentence categories,while"lai"can only appear in declarative sentences and exclamatory sentences.In addition,both of them can mark the first three atypical topics mentioned in Chapter 2,and"dou"can also mark the translocation topic."Dou"and"lai"can show the division of topic level at the speaker’s psychological level in the multi-topic structure.Finally,the pragmatic functions of"dou"and"lai"are analyzed:information function,hypothetical function and discourse function.From the cross-language perspective and based on the previous studies and the evolution of topic markers in other languages and other Chinese dialects,the fourth chapter investigates of the grammatical origins and further evolution of the above four topic markers.The topic markers"yige"and"nige"evolved from demonstrative pronouns.We investigated 10 dialects in Hunan Province and found that there are phenomena of demonstrative elements evolving into topic markers in these dialects.The topic marker"dou"evolved from the adverb"dou",a topic-sensitive operator,and changed from the backward adverbial to the forward-attached topic marker."Lai"was derived from the interrogative modal particle.The grammatical sources of the four are all common grammatical sources of topic markers.We also focus on the further evolution of the topic marker"dou",including as a word formation morpheme,the copula usage and the cue marker usage.The fifth chapter examines the co-occurrence and distribution differences of topic markers.The above four topic markers mainly have two co-occurrence situations:"pre-TM+T+post-TM+C"and"T₁+post-TM₁+C₁,T₂+post-TM₂+C₂".In terms of distribution differences,"yige"and"nige"are affected by the phenomenon of semantic retention,and there are obvious distribution differences according to the different spatial,temporal and psychological distances between the referent object of the topic and the speaker.Postpositional markers"dou"and"lai"differ from each other in terms of syntactic distribution,the attributes of the marked topic and the pragmatic purpose the speaker wants to achieve.