WU Fuyun（吴芙芸）

Professor of Linguistics

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Website:http://sfl.sjtu.edu.cn/CN/TeacherShow.aspx?info_lb=3&flag=3&mid=200&fid=1

Keynote Talk:

Processing Chinese Topic Sentences

Chinese as a topic-comment language has a variety of topic-comment structures (Chao 1968; Li & Thompson, 1976). Many Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) sentences have an alternative Topic-Subject-Verb (TSV) order, and topic structures can occur in relative clauses (RCs) as well (Xu & Langendoen, 1985). Existing processing work on Chinese topic structures has mainly focused on comparing TSV and SVO sentences, yielding mixed results regarding whether topic is base-generated or is derived by movement. To further explore these issues, we conducted three self-paced reading experiments as well as a sentence-completion task, using TSV and SVO sentences both in main clauses (MCs) and in RCs. We aim to answer three research questions: First, how is the sentence-initial noun phrase (NP) interpreted, as a subject or as a topic? Second, does integration of a topic-NP incur processing costs at the verb? Third, does syntactic complexity affect processing of Chinese TSV sentences? We discuss the implications of our findings for the two influential sentence-processing models, namely experience-based theories (Levy, 2008; MacDonald, 2013) and memory-based theories (Gibson, 2000; Lewis & Vasishth, 2003). Our results also shed light on the long-standing debate in theoretical linguistics regarding the syntactic analysis of Chinese topic structures.

About the speaker

Dr. Fuyun Wu is Professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She graduated from the English Department of Fudan University in 1996. From 2000 to 2009, she was in the United States obtaining in succession two MAs (University of Arizona, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and one PhD (University of Southern California). Dr. Wu’s research focuses on theoretical and applied questions in the processing of human language comprehension (particularly, adult sentence processing), production, and acquisition. Her recent work is published in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, Language and Cognitive Processes, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, PLOS One, EUROSLA Yearbook, and some refereed Chinese journals.