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Functions of Non-subject Topics in Mandarin Conversations

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13249))

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Abstract

Some Chinese sentences allow a subject to take a full subject-predicate structure as its Predicate. The first subject is called “main subject” or “non-subject topic” (NS-topic) as distinct from the subject in the subject-predicate configuration. Previous studies mainly focus on the syntactic and semantic relations between the NS-topic and other components in the sentence. Not many researchers observe the functions of such elements in discourse. Based on a corpus of Mandarin conversations, we first calculate the occurrences of NS-topics and then examine their functions in sentences and in discourse. Our data show that four groups of NS-topics are prominent in conversations, namely, 1) modifiers of the subject, 2) temporal, spatial or conditional adverbials, 3) inverted objects, and 4) dangling topics. All the four groups of NS-topics have special discoursal functions, as lexical cohesive devices, as responses to alternative questions, or as local episodic topics in extended utterances.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Abbreviations of grammatical words are used following the conventions of Li [11] and Fang [12], such as MEAS for measure, ASP for aspect marker, TPART for topic particle, POSS for possessive marker, NEG for negation, etc. A key to the abbreviations is given at the end of the paper.

  2. 2.

    We followed the transcription conventions of Eggins and Slade [22]: T is for turn; here T29 refers to the 29th turn in the extract; labels in capital letter indicate the speaker identification; letters a, b, c, etc. mark the moves in one turn.

Abbreviations

1SG:

first person singular

2SG:

second person singular

3SG:

third person singular

ASP:

aspect maker

MEAS:

measure

NEG:

negation

TPART:

topic particle

POSS:

possessive

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Correspondence to Yanmei Gao .

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Gao, Y., Lyu, G. (2022). Functions of Non-subject Topics in Mandarin Conversations. In: Dong, M., Gu, Y., Hong, JF. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13249. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06703-7_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06703-7_25

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