Prueba de hipótesis derivada 6

(Norman, 1991: 163)

This example shows that the verbal suffix –le refers to the past tense in the sentence. In order to make a comparison with example Ex3.9 and Ex3.9a, the lexical entry of Ex3.10 is illustrated functionally, as in Ex3.10a.

Ex 3.10a [chi-le] V

eat EXP ate/have eaten

chi-le: V, [(PRED) ‘CHI <(SUBJECT) (OBJECT)>’] [(ASP) EXP]

In the example Ex3.10, the aspect marker -le indicates the completion of the action ‘chi (as eat)’. The notion of completion indicated here is naturally associated with the fact that something has already taken place (Yip and Rimmington, 2004).

Grammatically, -le can appear in verb-final (VF-le), sentence-final (SF-le), and both verb-final and sentence-final (VF/SF-le) positions (Jin and Hendriks, n.d.). Chao (1968) speculated that the difference between VF-le and SF-le is that SF-le relates that past event to the present - similar to the English present perfect. When –le follows a verb phrase at the end of a sentence, it often functions both as aspect marker, indicating a completed action, and as a sentence particle (Li and Thompson 1981; Yip and Rimmington, 1997; Smith, 1997; Zhu, 1982).

The aspect morpheme -guo is another experiential marker. It simply means ‘having the experience of doing something’. The verbal aspect suffix –guo denotes that an action is a prior occurrence of an event within a defined period of time and is discontinued into the present (Hawkins and Liszka cited in Hout, 2003; Jin and Hendriks, n.d.; Parkard, 2000; Yip and Rimmington, 1997).

As we explored above, Chinese words have few inflectional morphemes indicating categories such as tense and number of the subject or object for verbs, or categories such as gender and case for nouns. In the following sections, features at the syntactic level in Chinese will be the major focus.

53 3.5 Topicalization

A topic is recognized as the phrase in a discourse, that the rest of the discourse is understood to be about, by interlocutors (Chao, 1968). The remaining part of the sentence functions as a comment to interpret the topic. Hawkins (2003: 210-211) has claimed that ‘topic construction involves the highlighting or foregrounding of a particular constituent which is already known from the discourse or context of utterance, and then using the rest of the sentence to say something about it’.

Chinese marks such a discourse role as topic-prominence, in which the emphasis of the utterance is placed on the topic or the focus of a sentence. The topic constituent is positioned at the initial place, thus accounting for topicalization. One of the syntactic features in Chinese language is the greater use of topicalization (Chao, 1968).

In word-order typology, similar to the English language, the unmarked word order for Chinese follows the canonical principle of SVO (Hawkins, 2003; Huang, 1982); however, there are other word order variations: OSV, SOV (or (S)OV) and OVS (Li et al. cited in Chen and Tzeng, 1992). The OSV and OVS aim to emphasize the object of the sentence. In SOV, the object is definite, which suggests a particular object, and is usually preceded by ba. The examples of these syntactic structures are as follows:

(a) SVO: Wo mai –le yi ben shu. I buy EXP (ASP) one CL book. I bought one book.

(b) OSV: Shu, wo mai –le. Book, I buy EXP. The book, I bought it.

(c) SOV: Wo ba shu mai –le. I ba book buy EXP. I bought the book.

(S)OV: shu mai -le. book buy EXP. The book is bought. (d) VOS: Mai –le shu, wo. buy EXP book, I. I bought the book.

In topicalization structures, the focus of attention of a certain utterance is moved as the topicalized element, as shown below (Teng, 2007):

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Ex 3.11 Zhe ben shu, wo bu zhidao. This CL book, I not know. This book, I do not know.

In the above case, Ex3.11, ‘zhe ben shu’ is actually the object of the main utterance ‘wo bu zhidao’, which has been moved to the topic position of this sentence, to draw the attention and/or to emphasize its importance. In fact, the topic of a sentence is the main theme that the sentence includes. Any element which exists at the beginning of a sentence could be seen as a topic. Almost any constituent can serve as a topic in a sentence in Chinese. Thus, both SOV and OSV are legitimate orders and are frequently used in Chinese (Su, 2001).

On the linguistic basis, two views have been held. One group insists that the topic is actually inserted, while the others believe that the topic is moved. In either way, the topic must appear at the very beginning of the sentence. Therefore, time and place could be the topic, as long as they are placed at the beginning of a sentence at the ‘topic’ position.

Ex 3.12 zuotian xue xia de hen da. Yesterday, snow drop V-de very big. Yesterday, there was heavy snow.

In this example, ‘zuotian’ as a time adverb has been placed at the front of the sentence, thus functioning as the topic. Moreover, sometimes, the topic of a sentence is a set or a domain which is called a dangling topic, such as in Ex3.13:

Ex 3.13 shuiguo, ta xihuan pingguo.

The topic in this example is ‘shuiguo’ which functions as the domain of the actual object ‘pingguo’ discussed in the comment clause.

Apart from that, it is also the case that a sentence sometimes has both a subject and a topic, or, the topic could be the subject in some cases. When both a topic and a subject appear in a sentence, the topic is assigned at the beginning of any constituents in such a sentence, obviously before the subject. Erbaugh (cited in Slobin, 1997a: 392) offered an example, such as:

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