Pragmatic interpretations of structural topics and relativization in Chinese

The correlation between the topic construction and the relative construction has long been observed in the literature, This paper demonstrates that, in Chinese, this correlation is best accounted for not in terms of the syntactic characterization, but in terms of the pragmatic interpretation of the syntactic topic involved. Specifically, independent of the syntactic characterization of the topic construction in question, three pragmatic interpretations of syntactic topic are identified in Chinese, namely, instance topic, frame topic, and range topic, each characterized by its special thematic structuring of the topic construction involved. It is established that whether and how the topic construction can be converted into a relative construction in Chinese depends crucially upon the differentiation between the three types of pragmatic interpretation of syntactic topic, The findings reported here suggest that what is defined as a syntactic topic does not constitute a homogeneous grammatical function in Chinese, They may also suggest further investigations of how the pragmatic differentiations of syntactic topic relate to other grammatical processes in Chinese, and whether and how such differentiations are established in other languages.