Topic-comment sentence structure in written english

Abstract

This study investigates the topic-comment sentence structure in written English. It finds that English makes use of both the subject-predicate structure syntactically and the topic-comment structure pragmatically. The results of this study challenge the typological claim that English sentence structures are subject-prominent which mainly follows the subject-predicate structure (Li & Thompson, 1976). Via the investigation, this study proposes that English sentence structures exhibit the properties of subject-prominent and topic-prominent languages. As is believed that the topic-comment structure in English is represented differently from that in the topic-prominent languages, this study investigates the constructions in English writing to explore the appearances of both the topic-comment and the non-topic- comment constructions. It finds that the selection of the subjects in canonical constructions is governed by the topic status of the subject and the topic-comment structure of the sentence. On the other hand, structure-preserving constructions, such as the passives, the tough and have constructions are noted to be responsible for maintaining the syntactic structure as well as supporting the topic-comment structure. Regarding topic constituents, subject topicalization is found to be the most economical way syntactically to represent topics in English (Chomsky, 1993, in Collins, 2001, p. 55). Subject topic is thus considered the unmarked topic in English (Lambrecht, 1996). This study bases the syntactic connections between the subject and the topic on the Split CP hypothesis by Rizzi (1997) who states that subject topics undergo the movement from Spec-TP to Spec-TopP to realize the topic of the sentence. As a result, the term subject topic refers to the topicalized subject in the Spec-TopP position, which co-refers to the deleted copy in the Spec-TP position. In both data, subject topics are represented mainly by DPs, and occasionally by CPs in National Geographic. The scene-setting topics are PPs, CPs, adverbs and AdvPs. The order of the subject topics in the sentence-initial position are likely to abide by the End-Weight Principle (Quirk et al, 1972) and the Principle of Early Immediate Constituents (EIC) (Hawkins, 1994), which do not apply to multiple topics. Semantically, non-agent outnumbers agent as the subject in the data. This in turn challenges Jackendoff’s (1990) Thematic Hierarchy which prioritizes agent rather than other semantic roles for the subject position. The topic-comment sentence structure affects the choice of constructions, so it, in turn, influences the selection of the subject. This study concludes that agent or non-agent semantic roles of the subject is influenced by the topic status of the subject.