Classical Chinese Lesson 2: Subject-predicate vs topic-comment structure in modern Mandarin
This is written for my Classical Chinese series, but focuses on modern Mandarin! So you don’t need to be following that series to get something out of it :D
(As ever, I am learning. If you see a mistake, please point it out and I will change it!)
A knowledge of what is the topic and what is the comment is hugely helpful in reading Classical Chinese, but before looking at our first stencils: let’s have a look at what those words actually mean. First, though, we need to talk about English grammar so we can understand just how Classical Chinese differs so much.
Subject + predicate structure
The syntax (way a sentence is put together) of English and other Indo-European languages in its most basic form can be summed up as subject + predicate. Very oversimplified, that’s the pronoun/noun/whatever that is doing the verb, and then everything else. So:
[I] am supposed to be learning Korean.
[My dog] ate my homework.
[Me and my pocket Discord friends] watched all 12 hours of Lord of the Rings.
[The professor in the tweed jacket] accused me of plagiarism.
The thing in the brackets is the subject, and everything else is the predicate. The predicate can be made up of loads of stuff: a verb (watched), an object (all 12 hours of Lord of the Rings) or even a sort of equals relationship (I = supposed to be learning Korean). It can also be relatively simple (I) or relatively complex (the professor in the tweed jacket).
I said above that the subject as the thing doing the verb is oversimplified, and that’s because things can get a bit more complicated than that. Look at the following sentences.
[The homework] was eaten by the dog.
[The film] scared my step-sister.
[He] is twenty-six.
[It] rained.
In the first sentence who is doing the verb? Well, the dog. The dog’s eating the homework - the homework isn’t doing anything, it’s just sitting there being eaten. It’s the dog that is doing something, but the homework is still the subject of our sentence. How do I know? 1) Because it’s in ‘subject position’, which in English is the first position, and 2) because we could say 'the homework was eaten’ and that still makes sense - 'by the dog’ is extra information. That’s. That’s still confusing.
The second sentence probably seems very normal. But when you think about it a bit more: the film isn’t doing anything. It’s just existing. My step-sister is the one who is feeling fear, and who is scared by it - that’s really all on her, not on the film. Some languages treat these types of verbs and subjects differently to the other ones above.
In the third sentence, 'is’ really works just like an equals sign. It doesn’t mean 'to exist’ in the same way that it does in the sentence 'I think, therefore I am’. It just means he = twenty-six.
In the fourth sentence: what rained? The sky? What rained??? What is going on???
The notion of the subject in English is so important that even when there is no subject, we have to put one in. So we can’t just say 'rained’. We have to put in a dummy subject pronoun, 'it’, to make the grammatically correct 'it rained’. The sentence does not work without it.
The reason I’m drawing your attention to this is because all of these different types of subjects are actually doing very different things. If you were to draw a syntax tree for all the last four sentences, they’d be very different. But they are all completely necessary in English. You can get rid of any other part of the sentence if you do a bit of linguistic gymnastics: if you look at the dog example, you can say 'The homework was eaten’. But we cannot get rid of the subject.
(For all you astute people out there: this is why in linguistics we make a distinction between the agent [the thing actually doing the verb in the world regardless of the sentence structure], the patient [the thing in the real world that has the verb done to it], and the subject [the thing that takes the place of a subject in a sentence, regardless of whether it is experiencing the verb, doing it, being done to, or whatever else]. How languages order these doesn’t always match up to what we’re used to in English.)
NB: the subject in subject-predicate languages does not always have to be overt. In languages like Spanish or Italian that have very sexy inflectional morphology, you don’t need to add the subject because the verb conjugation makes it extremely clear who is doing what. So I don’t need to say yo tengo calor, literally 'I have heat’ = 'I am hot’, I can just say tengo calor, because tengo HAS to be 'I’. It can’t be any other pronoun, because the verbs would conjugate differently. These languages are called pro-drop languages. This just means they are completely chill with not having an overt subject all the time. It does not mean, however, that they are not subject-predicate languages. They are.
The way that Classical Chinese is structured is completely different from this. Let’s look at this now!
Topic + comment structure
In many languages, the biggest division in the sentence and the most basic is not subject + everything else, but rather the topic of the sentence and a comment on that topic. This is the case in Classical Chinese, and much of Modern Chinese too. It’s also the case and much clearer because of particles in Korean and Japanese (though I don’t have as in-depth a knowledge of those languages, so please take what I say with a pinch of salt).
What does that actually mean?
First, you establish the topic. The topic is whatever you are talking about. Let’s take the example of the homework. The homework is what is important: it’s what you’re explaining to your teacher. So the sentence would be like:
As for my homework…the dog ate it.
'As for my homework’ is the topic, and 'the dog ate it’ is the comment. If you wanted to be even more specific, you could say 'As for my homework, it was the case that my dog ate it.'
This is an incredibly flexible sentence structure, because it enables us to place whatever we want to talk about at the beginning of the sentence. You can see that a lot of the examples above that have different orders in English can be simplified in this order:
As for me, I’m supposed to be learning Korean.
As for my sister, she was scared by the film.
As for last night, we watched all 12 hours of LOTR.
You can see pretty quickly, however, that some of these sentences can be changed to give emphasis to different parts. Let’s take the Discord LOTR sentence:
As for last night, we watched all 12 hours of LOTR. > the topic is 'last night’. This is perhaps answering the question 'What did you do last night?’ or maybe talking about what you did on many evenings, and then specifying 'But last night, we did this.’
As for all 12 hours of LOTR, we watched them last night. > here the topic is different. Now we’re talking about LOTR! Maybe somebody was talking about those films, and we added that we watched them last night. Or maybe - because the function of these topic-comment sentences is often to stress or provide contrast in some way - we watched some other film on Thursday, but LOTR (not any other film, LOTR) last night.
As for me and my Discord friends, we watched all 12 hours of LOTR last night > now the topic is me and my Discord friends! So maybe some other people watched some other film or did something else, and we want to say: ok, but this is what we did.
You can see that this topic-comment structure is hugely flexible, and allows for a lot of nuance that is expressed differently in the language in question. There’s a lot more to it in Classical Chinese, Japanese and Korean - a lot more nuances - but that’s enough for our purposes, since modern Chinese doesn’t mark the topic and comment explicitly.
Topic-comment in modern Chinese
One of the most common mistakes learners (learners = me) make is following the subject-predicate structure too closely, because it’s not something people are really usually told about. Like many things in Chinese grammar, it appears superficially similar to English and other European languages - so similar that at the beginning you just go, ok, cool, these are the same. But despite superficial similarities the two languages structure information in fundamentally different ways. A lack of understanding of this difference will create Chinese that, no matter how great your tones are and how wide your vocabulary is, probably doesn’t sound very natural.
The most wonderful (most annoying) thing about the topic-comment structure is that you don’t have to specify the topic if it’s already clear. 下雨了- what’s raining? It doesn’t really matter. 都挺好 - I don’t need to specify 我们都挺好 / 他们都挺好. If the topic is clear - and the topic and the grammatical subject are often the same thing - you can just drop it. This is clearest of course in languages like Korean and Japanese where you have specific particles marking the topic and/or the subject but I’m not really qualified to talk about those - and it also applies to Chinese. (Actually, you can drop pretty much anything that is already clear in Chinese.) This is how you end up with sentences in Chinese that are structured like this:
TOPIC + COMMENT + COMMENT + COMMENT + COMMENT + COMMENT + …
and so on. These sentences are notoriously hard to translate to English, because the topic or subject isn’t repeated in each clause. This type of structure is very common in longer essays or literature.
You’ll also see this all the time in more natural speech. If you want to translate a sentence like ‘I don’t think that what he said at the meeting yesterday was very appropriate’, you could say something like ‘I don’t think [he yesterday at the meeting said DE speech] was very appropriate’, but a more natural translation might be like ‘what he said yesterday at the meeting, I don’t think it was very appropriate’. Let’s find some random examples from Baidu (I’ve searched for 关于 because it’ll give us the right kind of complex sentence):
要讲关于自己的问题，对我来说并不容易 = lit. ‘want to talk about my own problems, to me it’s not easy at all’ > Talking about my own problems doesn’t come easily to me.
关于这份工作你有进一步的消息吗？= lit. ‘about this job, do you have further information?’ > Have you had any more information about the job yet?
昨晚关于印度的那个节目你看了没有？= lit. ‘yesterday about India that program, have you watched?’ > Did you see that program on India last night?
关于我们的决定，下周你会接到通知 = lit. ‘about our decision, next week you will receive notification’ > ‘You should receive notification of our decision in the next week’
You can see in all of these examples that the topic of the sentence - talking about my own probelms, this job, that program about India last night, our decision - comes first, followed by the comment. Even if simple modern Chinese sentences like 我喜欢你 ‘I like you’ don’t appear to follow the topic-comment structure as strictly as Japanese or Korean sentences, that’s mainly because of a lack of particles. More complex sentences are more likely to be structured like the above.
Even simpler sentences can be structured in this way. All of these are from Chinese Grammar Wiki (you’d expect commas in writing):
不好意思，咖啡我都喝完了 - lit. ‘sorry, coffee I have finished drinking’
票还有吗？- lit. ‘tickets are there any still?’
这个问题, 你一个人没办法解决 - lit. ’this problem you can’t solve alone’
那部电影, 看过的人都喜欢 - lit. ‘this film the people who watched it all liked’
他的事 ，我不想管那么多 - lit. ‘his business, I don’t want to be so involved’
These are all very natural sentences, and they all follow the topic-comment structure! Even if it’s not as clear as Japanese or Korean, this is key to sounding natural as second language learners of Chinese.
It’s also *drumroll* incredibly important for Classical Chinese, which follows this structure much more closely than the modern language.
Next time: how to mark topic-comment in Classical Chinese using particles, and what happens when the particles (woe unto me, you, etc) do not behave as they should! Because. Come on guys what did you expect.
加油！
- 梅晨曦
