Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica

Abstract

Although there have been quite a few studies on the Chinese clause connectives in the past, most of them concerned themselves with the semantic functions of these connectives, paying scanty attention to the syntactic behavior of them, especially their positions in a sentence. My continuous research in the roles that topics play in Chinese syntax has led to two findings with regard to the interaction between topics and clause connectives.
First, clauses of time, location, reason, concession and condition, as in (1a) and (1b), should all be analyzed as the primary topic of the sentence.
    (1) a. ruguo  ta  bu   lai     de  hua,  ching  ta   tungjr  wo.
       if      he  not  come  DE  case  ask      him  notify  me
       'If he is not coming, ask him to notify me.'
    b. ruguo  ta  bu   lai,  ching    ta   tungjr  wo.
       if      he  not  come  ask    him  notify  me
       'Same as (a).'
This point was first made by Chao (1968), in which several arguments were also given.  In addition to Chao's arguments, I have added several of my own in support of this analysis.
Second, my continuous research of topics in Chinese has led to the finding that the second nominative in a double nominative construction, the fronted object and the preverbal adverbials which occur between the primary topic and the main verb should all be analyzed as secondary topics. This finding enables us to account for the placement of an important class of clause connectives which includes sueiran 'though', yinwei 'because' and ruguo 'if'. If we make the further assumption that in the underlying stucture they occur in the S-initial COMP position, as in (2a), then their other positions as exemplified by (2b), can be accounted for by the rule of "topic-raising".
    (2) a. sueiran ta tzuotian    sheng-bing, dan haishr chiu shangban le.
       though  he yesterday get-sick    but still  go   office   PART
       'Although he was sick yesterday, he still went to his office.'
    b. ta tzuotian    sueiran sheng-bing, dan haishr chiu shangban le.
       he yesterday though    get-sick    but still  go   office   PART
       'Same as (a)'
An examination of Classical Chinese data reveals that same rule is also required showing that the rule has been in existence in the Chinese language for a long time.
Finally, on the basis of our findings, we propose a syntactically significant scheme for the classification of all Chinese clause connectives.