从功能主义的角度论现代汉语的话题化

Topicalization in Modern Chinese——from a functionalist standpoint

本文从功能主义的角度对现代汉语的“话题化”问题进行探讨,指出话题和述题必须在语义上相关可视为会话合作原则的一个具体表现,而句法结构本身则并不一定需要从配价关系上把话题规定为述题中某一个成分的配项,以便保障话题和述题之间的句法关系和语义联系.人们能够凭借自己对世界的知识和推论能力在话题和述题之间找出语义联系.文章指出话题来源于上下文/语言环境,述题来源于被话题激活的一系列知识.这一思路不仅可以解释话题跟述题之间的语义联系,而且还可以解释语义理解上的一些特殊现象.

This paper will discuss topicalization in Modern Chinese from a functional- ist standpoint, and show that the topic and comment must be seen as a concrete manifesta- tion of the cooperative principle in conversation. Because people can employ their own world knowledge and ability to infer to find semantic relationship in the topic and comment, syntactic structure itself has no need to restrict the topic to a dependent constituent of the comment for the purpose of maintaining the syntactic and semantic relationship between the topic and comment. This paper points out that the topic originates in the early context or the utterance environment, while the comment originates from an assortment of knowledge activated by the topic. This line of thinking not only explains the semantic relationship between the topic and comment, but also explains several other individual phenomena associated with semantic understanding.