What are the key features of Chinese topic-comment construction

The key features of Chinese topic-comment construction include the following:

1. Topic Prominence: Chinese is a topic-prominent language, where the topic often appears at the beginning of a sentence, serving as the theme or what the sentence is about. The comment then provides information or a statement about this topic.

2. Information Structure: Topic-comment construction is used to organize information by separating known or given information (the topic) from new or important information (the comment), helping optimize communication and comprehension.

3. Flexibility: The topic in Chinese sentences can be omitted if it is clear from context, and multiple topic-comment pairs can be present in a sentence, allowing layered or chained topics.

4. Pragmatic Function: This construction facilitates pragmatic functions, including emphasis, contrast, and topic shifts, making it an essential feature in discourse and conversation management.

5. Semantic and Syntactic Characteristics: The topic and comment have a semantic relationship, often reflecting a cognitive or discourse-based organization. Syntactically, the topic is often fronted before the comment, which is generally predicative.

These features contribute to the unique way Chinese structures and conveys information compared to subject-prominent languages like English. ^{7, 9, 18, 19}

References

• Talk on the Interpersonal Theme in Modern Chinese

• Discourse-pragmatic Functions of a Chinese Topic-comment Construction and L2 Teaching Strategies Based on Authentic Media Materials

• Review of Fisac & Moratto (2024): Fundamental Structures of the Chinese Language: Topic-Comment and Other Key Structures

• Topic Analysis of Chinese Documents Based on Key Phrases and Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model

• Identification of Key Features for VR Applications with VREVIEW: A Topic Model Approach

• Practical Applications of ChatGPT and BERT: Long Text Summarization and Model Feature Ablation Study for Stock Comment Topic Identification

• Comparative analysis of the topic-comment structure in Chinese and Russian

• ASKDetector: An AST-Semantic and Key Features Fusion based Code Comment Mismatch Detector

• Semantic similarity and mutual information predicting sentence comprehension: the case of dangling topic construction in Chinese

• Optimizing topic classification and sentiment analysis in Chinese car comments using CorEx algorithm based on BERT model

• Advancing Topic Segmentation and Outline Generation in Chinese Texts: The Paragraph-level Topic Representation, Corpus, and Benchmark

• Coherent Comments Generation for Chinese Articles with a Graph-to-Sequence Model

• Xinyu: An Efficient LLM-based System for Commentary Generation

• Chinese Discourse Annotation Reference Manual

• Building Chinese Discourse Corpus with Connective-driven Dependency Tree Structure

• Sequential Annotation and Chunking of Chinese Discourse Structure

• NaturalConv: A Chinese Dialogue Dataset Towards Multi-turn Topic-driven Conversation

• Chinese Topic Chains: An Analysis of the Topic Chains Used in Fortress Besieged

• The Periphrastic Topic Structures in Chinese-English Interlanguage

• NewsDialogues: Towards Proactive News Grounded Conversation