Comparative analysis of the topic-comment structure in Chinese and Russian

The article provides a comparative analysis of topical-comment structures in Chinese and Russian media discourse and is carried out according to the functional and pragmatic approach. Such structures are considered the basis for the information organization of an utterance, ensuring the effective distribution of new and already known information for optimal perception by the listener or reader. Interest in the object of study is due to the different typological structure of the Chinese and Russian languages, which is particularly reflected at the semantic and syntactic levels. The article aims at comparing topical-comment structures in Chinese and Russian news texts to assess how the typological structure of the language influences the realization of syntactic constructions that convey the information structure of the utterance. As a result, it was found that topical-comment structures can be divided into three groups according to their functionality: informative, goal-setting and evaluative types. In Russian media texts, the informative type dominates, while in Chinese all three types are presented almost equally. The study also demonstrated stable differences in the realization of topic-comment structures specifically in media discourse: while in Russian, a linear text structure is observed with a predominance of a logical sequence and a close semantic connection between the topic and the comment, in Chinese the structure has greater evaluativeness and a smaller logical and grammatical connection between the topic and the comment. This circumstance indicates that the context in the Chinese news text is more implicit, while in Russian, on the contrary, it is distinguished by explicitness.