A Comparative Analysis of Subject-prominence of English and Topic-prominence of Chinese

A Comparative Analysis of Subject-prominence of English and

Topic-prominence of Chinese

Abstract: As native English speaker features preciseness and logic, English is rather compact and well-knit. On the other hand, as Chinese way of thinking lays considerable emphasis on fuzziness and wholeness, Chinese is, therefore, natural and spontaneous. English is theme-rheme structure and Chinese is topic-comment construction.

Key words: subject; topic; English; Chinese Introduction

All languages in the world fall into four categories: 1) subject-prominent language; 2) topic-prominent language; 3) both subject-prominent and topic-prominent language; 4) neither subject-prominent nor topic-prominent language ( Charles N.L. & Sandra A,1994). English is subject-prominent in that: it is quite simple to identify subject and predicate in the English sentences. On the contrary, Chinese language with complicated and flexible subject-predicate structure features the topic-comment structure.

1.A comparative analysis of subject-prominence of English

and topic-prominence of Chinese

It has been pointed out that subject-predicate structure is a key element in judging whether a language is subject-prominent or topic-prominent, and it indeed is a distinguishing mark of English and Chinese. The mode of thinking is different in languages. The precision-oriented way of thinking stands out in the clarification of the English sentence structure, as firstly evidenced by the extensive use of hypotaxis in the formation of sentences. By employing numerous cohesive ties and

logic-grammatical connectors to put words and clauses together, hypostasis renders English to be a language featuring explicit cohesion. Thus the tight structure enables the speaker/writer to express his views clearly and accurately while the listener/reader can grasp the former’s idea with few outside clues, say, the specific situation in which linguistic communication is taking place. Therefore English is “a low-context and writer-responsible language”(连淑能, 2011:77). The Chinese way of thinking, by contrast, is far vaguer than that of the westerners. As the conventional notion of “man is an integral part of nature” indicates, the Chinese tend to group separate things together, which results in the lack of a system of classification or holistic thought. Thus, correlativity and

relational thinking instead of analysis and dissection are more often than not displayed in most Chinese people upon pondering some problem. It is inevitable that the Chinese develop the subjective thinking focusing on man that causes Chinese people to have their ideas and feelings based on personal tastes and views. 2.A comparative analysis of English theme-rheme and Chinese topic-comment

Another criterion for determining whether a language is subject-prominent or topic-prominent is the number of the topic-comment construction in Chinese and its

counterpart―theme-rheme in English. Theme is placed at the beginning of a clause from where the message of the clause flows towards the end of the clause, and as often as not, theme is the given information and rheme is the new information. Meanwhile, theme does not necessarily have to be nominal groups, adverbial groups or prepositional phrases are also employed as the theme. Chinese is topic-prominent in that it shares almost all the characteristics of other TP languages. In Chinese sentences topic is much more important than subject. It does not require any kind of “agreement” with the verb, which, on the contrary, plays a vital part in indicating the subject in a SP language, e.g. in the sentence “这本书我很喜欢”, “这本