Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Sino-Platonic Papos, 27 (August 3 1,199 1)
The above sentence is taken from Chuo (1987), who also discusses in some detail the
placement of some posit ion-wise versatile adverbs such as 'again', gu yi 'in tent ionally',
'probablyt7 and 'not'. We feel that it is a very valuable approach to discuss
these adverbs separately and we will return to the placement of some of these adverbs in
the next section.
But before we leave this topic, we would 1ike.to raise a very important question that
many researchers have taken for granted: Why is there such an order of adverbial
placement? More specifically, we would like to know whether it is fortuitous that-
temporals and locatives precede-all others.
3. Temporals and Locatives as NOR-primary Topics
To the best of my knowledge, the first linguist who specifically analyzed adverbials
that occur between the primary topic and the verb as topics is Hockett. He (1958:201-203)
comments:
Many Chinese comments consist in terms of a topic and comment so
that one can have a sentence built up of predications within
predications, Chinese-box style. 'Wo jintian chengli you shi' freely 'I
have business in town today' has topic 'wo' '1' and the remainder as
comment. 'Jintian chengli you shi' 'There is business in town today'
in turn has topic 'jintian' 'today' and the remainder as comment.
'chengli you shi' 'There is business in town' consists of topic 'chengli'
'in town, town's interior' and comment 'you shi' 'there is business.'8
Chao (1968) also recognizes the existence of non-primary temporal and locative topics,
although he does not explicitly call them as such. He states' (op. cit. p.534):
If there are both time and place words as subjects [topics in our
terms, F.T.], the time word usually though not always precedes the
place word, as in jintian haishang fenglang hen da. "Today on the sea
the wind and waves are high." But the main topic is what decides the
main . subject [the primary topic, F.T.]. For example, women iiali
jlnnian auonian. keshi aunian meivou. 'In our house, we celebrate the
New Year this year, but last year we didn't.' where the place word
jiali is main subject [the primary topic] under which jinnia,n and
ounian are smaller subjects [non-primary topics] .9
Neither Hockett nor Chao, however, give any specific argument for this analysis. In
what follows we would like to present our arguments in its support.