English-style and Chinese-style Topic : A Uniform Semantic Analysis

This paper provides a uniform semantic framework for Topic-Comment Structures in Chinese. It is assumed that the topic element relates to an anaphor occuring in the comment. The comment which contains an unresolved anaphor is semantically underspecified. The semantic interpretation of topic-comment constructions results from the resolution of the anaphoric relation between topic and comment. In the case where there is no explicit anaphor in the comment, a bridging inference takes place. The proposed analysis is modelled in a DRT-based framework. The introduction of a DRS segmented for topic-comment articulation, called TC-DRS, serves to compute the topic-comment relation within the discourse semantic theory DRT compositionally.