An Analysis of Communicative Roles and Syntactic Aspects of Variant Clauses, the Case of Marked-Topic Constructions

Abstract

           The research article is an analysis of communicative roles and syntactic aspects of variant clauses, the case of marked-topic constructions, in Thai in narrative discourses on the basis of Functional-typological Grammar. Data were from 200 written discourses. The results show that the marked-topic group includes 5 distict clause types: 1) fronting used in introducing topics in the first discourse part and maintaining topics in the content part and syntactically coded by moving the topicalized constituent initially, 2) topic-comment used in introducing topics in the first discourse parts, maintaining tipics in the content parts and summarizing contents finally and syntactically coded by establishing the topic part initially, 3) left dislocation used in expressing definite and anaphoric topics and syntactically coded by anaphoric pronoun retaintion, 4) right dislocation used in checking for accessibility and syntactically coded by anaphoric (including zero-anaphor) retaintion and 5) existential used in introducing important new referents and changing given information into new information and syntactically coded by aspects such as involving existential verbs, inverse subject-verb order, and grammaticalization of verbs.