Processing Chinese Topic Structures in Contexts:A Comparison Between the Topic Structures in the Main Clause and in the Relative Clause
Chinese is generally considered an SVO language as English.But unlike English that stresses on the subject-predicate relation in a sentence,Chinese is known as a topic-prominent language where the topic bears an"aboutness"condition with the rest of the clause.In theoretical linguistics,it has been much of a debate regarding whether topic is base-generated or derived via syntactic movement.One way to address this controversy is to examine real-time processing of a gapped topic structure where a gap is presumably involved,and compare it with that of canonical SVO structures.For instance,when parsing Topic-Subject-Verb(TSV)sentences,Chinese comprehenders need to maintain the filler(i.e.topic)in working memory,and then retrieve and integrate it into the verb down the parsing stream.As constructing long-distance dependency is costly,processing difficulty is expected at the verb in TSV sentences compared to canonical SVO sentences with adjacent verb-argument dependency.However,existing psycholinguistic work has yielded mixed results,with some finding a processing disadvantage of TSV structure and others showing no processing differences between the two structures.We notice two inadequacies in prior research:ⅰ)definite topics were used,without being licensed by discourse contexts,andⅱ)simple sentences might have rendered ceiling effect,yet objects can be extracted from prenominal relative clauses(RC)in Chinese,a structure that is known to be complex.Thus,understanding the fact that Chinese TSVs can occur in both main clauses and RCs,we created natural contexts to introduce definite topics,and conducted a self-paced reading experiment with 60 Chinese participants.We manipulated word order(TSV vs.SVO)and structural complexity of the topicalized object(RC vs.main clause),yielding four conditions.We created 24 sets of stimuli,along with 32 filler trials.We ran linear mixed effects models on the critical regions of the RC-verb,the head noun(HN)of RC,the matrix verb,and their spillover regions.Our results showed that TSVs were more difficult to process than SVOs in the RC-verb,HN and post-HN regions—most likely due to canonicality of the SVO structure,but critically,no processing difficulties were found at the verbs regardless of whether the topic is in the main clause or in the RC.These findings lend support to the analysis that Chinese topic structures are base-generated,suggesting that it may not be necessary for a long-distance filler-gap dependency to be constructed in parsing Chinese topic structures.Instead,a semantic dependency is likely to be constructed.
万方数据
