The origins and effects of topic-prominence in Chinese-English interlanguage

This exploratory paper enquires into the crosslinguistic influence of native language topic-prominence in shaping and accenting the written English discourse produced by Chinese learners. This approach is information structure-oriented and accounts more systematically than either morpho-syntactic or macrostructural contrastive studies for the kind of interlingual phenomena so frequently observed in the written English of these subjects. The enquiry involves demonstrating that the Chinese language, considered from a typological point of view, is topic-prominent in orientation. Hypotheses are then formulated against which to test the assertion that this feature may, under certain conditions, be transferred to a typologically distinct target language. Next, data produced in an elicitation procedure are analysed for evidence of transfer. Finally there is an attempt to demonstrate that topic-prominent interlingual discourse does not meet the criteria for adequate coherence in written English discourse.