Topic-comment constructions in L1-Chinese learners’ English

Topic-comment constructions in L1-Chinese learners’ English Yicheng Rong Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies Hong Kong Polytechnic University rosy.rong@polyu.edu.hk Hui Chang School of Foreign Languages Shanghai Jiao Tong University jameschanghui@163.com Candice Chi-Hang Cheung Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies Hong Kong Polytechnic University candice.ch.cheung@polyu.edu.hk Abstract Given the typological differences between Chinese and English, the question arises whether and how topic-prominent (TP) features affect the English development of L1-Chinese learners. The present study explores this question by examining the non-target-like structures surfacing in learners’ interlanguage. 200 essays were randomly selected from the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners, taking two factors into consideration: English proficiency level and production form (written and oral). One major manifestation of interlanguage structures (i.e. topic-comment constructions, categorized into six types) was tagged, and the processes by which the structures are formed were analyzed to explore the relative difficulty of unlearning them. The study revealed that as learners’ English proficiency improves, the incidence of structures with TP features decreases (intermediate learners: 3.77%; advanced: 2.30%), approximating their incidence in the subject-prominent language English, fewer structures with TP features are found in the learners’ oral (4.76%) than their written (1.31%) production, and the frequencies of six types of topic-comment construction differ markedly. In light of our findings, we propose a hierarchy for the difficulty of unlearning TP features. 1 Introduction Chinese is well known as a topic-prominent (TP) language, whereas English is subject-prominent (SP) (Li and Thompson, 1976, 1981). For instance, sentences like (1a) are natural in Chinese, but the English counterpart in (1b) is ungrammatical. (1) a. 这些学生，他最聪明。 zhèxiē__xuéshēng,__tā__zuì__cōngmíng these__student__he__most__clever He is the cleverest of these students. b. These students, he is the cleverest. In (1a), zhèxiē xuéshēng ‘these students’ is the topic and the following part is the comment. It is a kind of Chinese topic-comment constructions (TCC for short), where the presence of the comma after the topic is optional. Chao (1965: 69) stated that all Chinese clauses can be regarded as TCCs, and he proposed that nearly 50% Chinese sentences are TCCs. Therefore, topics play a more important role than subjects in Chinese, and subjects may even be dropped, leading to null subjects. By contrast, subjects are of great significance in English. English does not allow null subject except in imperative sentences. There are also dummy subjects that do not have semantic content but serve the syntactic function of subjects only (e.g. expletive there and it). As a TP language, Chinese is known as a discourse-oriented language, while English is a sentence-oriented language. According to Rutherford (1983), one noticeable difference between Chinese and English lies in word order. Chinese has a pragmatic word order, which is relatively flexible, to meet discourse demands, whereas English as a SP language has a grammatical word order which is fairly rigid. Chu (1998) claimed that topic is a concept based on the discourse, and it can only be defined at a discourse level. Given the typological difference between Chinese and English, a question to address, theoretically and …

Content truncated to 500 words