本文采用语料分析的方法,研究了话题化和左失位两个基本话题结构在北京话口语中的使用情况。研究发现,在北京话口语中,前者无论在使用频率还是语篇功能的多样性上都超越了后者。通过与英语等主语突出型语言对比,话题化结构在汉语这样的话题突出型语言中已不单纯是语用的需要,其广泛的句法分布表明它承载着重要的句法意义。

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.