Identical topics in Mandarin Chinese and Shanghainese

Identical topic (IT henceforth) was previously known as copying topic (Xu & Liu (1998:141-157). It is fully or partially identical to a corresponding element (CE henceforth) occurring in the following part of the clause. Broadly speaking, IT is semantically empty. Being an unusual type of adding, it properly falls into the central concern of this volume. It seems IT can be attested in all Chinese dialects, though the phenomena in question have been poorly documented and have scarcely been studied under a unified category. IT seems to be a better candidate to characterise topic prominent languages than many other topic types including the non-gap topic, which has long been called "Chinese style topic" since Chafe (1976) and has been viewed as a major characteristic of topic prominent languages (e.g., Li & Thompson, 1976, Xu & Langendoen 1985, Gasde 1999). I believe the study of IT structure is necessary to obtain a clearer and more complete picture of topic structure in general. As far as I know, Wu dialects of Chinese, including Shanghainese, are the ones which have the richest IT types and the greatest text frequency of IT. Therefore, this study will be based on both Mandarin and Shanghainese data

The topic-prominence parameter

This article aims to recast the properties of topic-prominent languages and their differences from subject-prominent languages as documented in the functionalist literature into the framework of the Principle-and-Parameter approach. It provides a configurational definition of the topic construction called Topic Phrase (TP), with the topic marker as its head. The availablity of TP enables topic prominent languages to develop various topic structures with properties such as morphological marking; cross-categorial realization of topics and comments; and mutiple application of topicalization. The article elaborates the notion of topic prominence. A topic prominent language is characterized as one that tends to activate the TP and to make full use of the configuration. Typically, it has a larger number and variety of highly grammaticalized topic markers in the Lexicon and permits a variety of syntactic categories to occur in the specifier position and the complement position of TP

Issues on topics

The present volume contains papers that bear mainly on issues concerning the topic concept. This concept is of course very broad and diverse. Also, different views are expressed in this volume. Some authors concentrate on the status of topics and non-topics in so-called topic prominent languages (i.e. Chinese), others focus on the syntactic behavior of topical constituents in specific European languages (German, Greek, Romance languages). The last contribution tries to bring together the concept of discourse topic (a non-syntactic notion) and the concept of sentence topic, i.e. that type of topic that all the preceding papers are concerned with

Distinction Between Inflection and Derivation of Learning Reduplication in Mandarin

Reduplication as a word-formation process in Mandarin, which is one of the most difficult knowledge to comprehend for scholar and student. Theoretically this research offers an approach that is different from what has been made by previous researchers. Using the M.D.S Simatupang free context approach this research contrasts the reduplicative forms of all word classes and shows the relationships between them (AA, AABB, ABAB, ABB) and their basic forms (A, AB), then based on test of categorical word and test of lexical decomposition as proposed by J.W.M Verhaar, this study analyzes and explains reduplication and inflectional reduplication in Mandarin in order to students understand as their meaning vocabularies. As a result, this research examines the derivational and inflectional reduplication in Mandarin all at once can disseminate the use of morphological theory. In addition, this study discusses Mandarin reduplication based on various word classes that are contained as a basis for the relevant form of reduplication. Beginner research results will be presented in this study in order to stimulate more complete writing, it will be better if this research can be disseminated in order to add learning and reading material for future research