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.
- 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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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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