The basicness and development of topic and its structures in Cantonese-speaking preschool children

Abstract

Topic-prominence is a typologically distinctive feature of Cantonese (Li & Thompson, 1976, 1981; Matthews & Yip, 1994; Luke, Bodomo & Nancarrow, 2001). There has been controversy surrounding the basicness of topic and the derivability of topic-comment structures among Chinese linguists, given the varied definitions proposed in characterizing the notion. The present paper distinguishes sentence topic from discourse topic, regarding it as a grammatical notion on a par with subject. In this work, the development of topic and its structures is investigated in typically-developing native Cantonese preschool children. Their concepts of topic and subject are also examined to provide evidence for the basicness of topic in Cantonese. This research is comprised of a corpus study and an experiment, providing a complete picture of child language development through both naturalistic and experimental data. Transcripts from the HKU-70 corpus were examined to observe the development of topic-comment structures in preschool children and 81 typically-developing Cantonese children aged between 2;6-5;11 were tested for their sensitivity to the concepts of topic and subject based on the two grammatical functions’ obligatory control relations with syntactic gaps. Results from corpus and experiment are consistent. The concept of topic is acquired before the age of 2;6 and manifested in child language by the age of 5 in terms of both production frequency and comprehension performance; whereas further development after 5;11 is observed for subject. The findings support the basicness of topic in Cantonese and a syntactic position reserved for topic in Chinese languages. A possible association between NP development and children’s interpretation of topic structures is also explored.