The Integration Functions of Topic Chains in Chinese Discourse

Abstract

The topic chain, one of the essential organization devices in Chinese discourse, is highlighted by the use of many co-referential zero forms. Although the topic chain has been realized to play an important role in organizing discourse, few attempts have been made to explore how the topic chain forms an integrated and meaningful unit and facilitates discourse organization, which are called the “integration functions” of the topic chain in this paper. This study, based on a comprehensive review of topic chain studies, re-examines the core characteristics of the topic chain. After this, the integration functions of the topic chain are analysed from internal and external levels. The topic chain itself can manage its internally different clauses to form a cohesive, meaningful and unified unit. At this stage, this paper clearly demonstrates why so much information within a topic chain is assembled into such a compact structure. At the discourse level, one topic chain can associate with other topic chains or non-chain constructions to establish textual coherence. Making use of zero anaphora, co-reference, cognitive orders and other non-morph-syntactic devices, the topic chain can combine different discourse units together to construct Chinese discourse. The study provides a systematic and well-developed account of the integration functions for the topic chain, which is significant for a deeper understanding of the nature of the topic chain and how discourse coherence is established in Chinese.

Predicting native Chinese readers’ perception of sentence boundaries in written Chinese texts

“…The first type of semantic shift hypothesized to affect meaning completeness judgment is "topic shift". In Chinese, a block of clauses may form a "topic chain" when they share the same topic, which is explicitly mentioned in a topic clause but implicitly referred to with an empty category in several comment clauses (Li, 2004;Sun, 2019), as illustrated in the third sentence in Example (1), in which the topic "Cuicui" is explicitly mentioned in clause (e) and stays the same through the end of the topic chain. A "topic shift" occurs if a different topic arises in the next block of clauses.…”

Quantifying Discourse Support for Omitted Pronouns

“…The multiclausal aspect of Topic Chains supports Figure 2: Analysis steps adopted in this study: (a) Grammatical subjects and objects of each main verb are identified via dependency parsing on the whole story discourse of The Little Prince (See a sentence example from Table 1, columns "S", "V", "O"); (b) Semantic role annotation: for all the subjects and objects, annotate their semantic roles as AGENT or PATIENT (See Table 1 column "V-agent" and "Vpatient"); (c) Character role annotation: assign story character roles to the entities, see character occurrences in Table A1, and Table 1 column "character"; (d) History verb retrieval for each story character: for each story character, tabulate the verbs that are its main verbs being used in the discourse (See example Table A3); (e) Relevance between history verbs and a current verb: for each current verb, calculate its relevance to the history verbs, and sum with or without their distance weight (See Table 2 and A5); (f) Salience of the correct character: for each verb, calculate how "salient" the correct character is compared to all other characters (See example Table A6); (g) Group test between pro-drop verbs vs. non-pro-drop verbs, and apply logistic regression to test predictability of character salience on dropping behavior (See group results in Table 3 and Figure 3). long-distance coreference (Sun, 2019). Taking a dynamic perspective, Pu (2019b) suggests that a topic chain "encodes a referent that is cognitively most accessible at the moment of discourse production, as enhanced by maximum discourse coherence of topic continuity and thematic coherence".…”

The Complexity of Zero Anaphora in Chinese Discourse: An Event-related Perspective

“…Every zero form from C1-C9, however, has the same constituent, "yellow flower wheat fruit", and this same constituent occurs in each clause. (Sun 2015(Sun , 2018(Sun , 2019a(Sun , 2019b Some ZAs in this passage have nominal referents derived from the previous clauses through gradual accumulation, but sometimes their antecedents are not always nominal, for example, the…”