Abstract:

This paper presents a corpus study of two topic-comment constructions,namely topicalization(TOP) and left-dislocation(LD) in the Beijing dialect.The study finds that TOP not only occurs more frequently than LD in the corpus,but also has a more diverse role to fulfill in discourse.When put against the background of other languages in the world,TOP in Mandarin,a topic-prominent language,is not simply pragmatically motivated as in English,a subject-prominent language,and its extensive distribution across the board of different linguistic constructions attests to its syntactic significance.