Estudio comparativo del eje temático en español y chino

Abstract

This paper is a comparative study between Spanish and Chinese, focusing on a general syntactic aspect: the thematic axis. Chinese and Spanish belong to different typological families, although, as happens with many very different languages, they share an order of constituents of the SVO type and also the validity of the thematic axis, a binary form of organisation of the syntactic constituents, where the order is the fundamental marking. The theme is the first element that opens the message, and the predicate, or rheme, is everything that comes after it, i.e. everything that is predicated of the theme. The paper begins by presenting the characteristics of the syntactic theme (a unit of a presentational, referential, contrastive and optional nature) which will be the focus of our subsequent comparative study between Spanish and Chinese. The thematic axis is complemented by the transitive axis, which is a criterion for the organisation and identification of the constituents within the predicate, and which presents common and differential features between both languages, but which is not the object of this work. Once the relevant features of the theme and the type of structuring of the thematic axis have been established, we will tackle the practical study aimed at verifying the similarity and divergence of its use in both languages, through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of data extracted from two important novels in their original Chinese and Spanish versions and their corresponding translations. Although the thematic axis, as such, is perhaps not something that can be directly taught to learners of these languages as a foreign language, at least in basic courses, knowledge of aspects such as those dealt with in the present work undoubtedly helps teachers to have a clearer framework of the similarities between the two languages, through which they can better guide students in their learning of the target language. The usefulness of this comparison between Spanish and Chinese can be extended to that of other languages with which they share the validity of this thematic axis