Jiaqi Hou, Frédéric Landragin

Correlation between sentence topic and discourse topic in French and Chinese: annotation issues and contrastive analysis

  • History and Philosophy of Science
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics
Save to CiteDrive Show PDF

AbstractThis paper aims to investigate the correlation between “sentence topic (ST)” and “discourse topic (DT)”, both based on an “aboutness” relation. It also compares the degrees of correlation between French and Chinese, considered respectively as a subject‐prominent and a topic‐prominent language. Kendall's correlation tests, Poisson models and z‐tests were conducted using manually annotated textual data. The results confirm a positive correlation between STs and DTs in both languages. Although the correlation coefficients are higher in Chinese, z‐tests' results do not show a significant difference between the two languages. We explain that the two languages differ not only in the more or less frequent topic‐comment constructions, but also in the choice of more or less accessible referential markers which represent the STs, or in the more or less tacit way that STs of different sentences are related to each other.

Need a simple solution for managing your BibTeX entries? Explore CiteDrive!

  • Web-based, modern reference management
  • Collaborate and share with fellow researchers
  • Integration with Overleaf
  • Comprehensive BibTeX/BibLaTeX support
  • Save articles and websites directly from your browser
  • Search for new articles from a database of tens of millions of references
Try out CiteDrive

More from our Archive