한국어와 중국어의 주어와 화제에 대하여

In regard to the subject and topic of Korean and Chinese

The purpose of this study is to review critically problems of the definition of the subject of Korean and Chinese with respect to the topic, and to analyze the characteristic of the topic of the two languages, also to clarify the differences and similarities. Reviewing the definition of the subject of Korean and Chinese critically, the presence of the subject form or ‘i/ga’ in Korean and the word order, in front of predicate in Chinese are very superficial phenomena. These can not only identify the subject of the two languages and it has been confirmed that it is effective in identifying the subject to consider the selectional restriction of predicate. The characteristic of the topic of Korean and Chinese has been examined in the second place. Elements of a sentence can be analyzed in the syntactic and the discourse perspective. The subject is the concept of the syntactic perspective and the topic is the discourse perspective. The topic, depending on languages, is achieved regularly and explicitly in elements of a sentence. Such languages refer to the topic prominent language, Korean and Chinese also have this characteristic. A sentence of this language is basically constructed, based on the relation of the topic and comment. Thus, based on the concept of the topic this paper examines the characteristic of the topic of Korean and Chinese. In conclusion, this paper examines the differences and similarities of the two languages with the topic position and maker, elements that may be the topic, and possibility of omission of the topic. To better identify and understand the characteristic of the subject and topic of Korean and Chinese, it will give a lot of help to analyze the sentence structure of both languages and it can contribute to the research of language typology with analysis of the differences and similarities of the topic of the two languages.