Topic-prominent language
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A topic-prominent language is a language that organizes its syntax to emphasize the topic–comment structure of the sentence. The term is best known in American linguistics from Charles N. Li and Sandra Thompson, who distinguished topic-prominent languages, such as Korean and Japanese, from subject-prominent languages, such as English.
In Li and Thompson's (1976) view, topic-prominent languages have morphology or syntax that highlights the distinction between the topic and the comment (what is said about the topic). Topic–comment structure may be independent of the syntactic ordering of subject, verb and object.
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Common features
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Many topic-prominent languages share several syntactic features that have arisen because the languages have sentences that are structured around topics, rather than subjects and objects:
- They tend to downplay the role of the passive voice, if a passive construction exists at all,This statement seems incorrect for Japanese: Japanese makes extensive use of the passive, even in technical writing.[<span title="Script error: No such module "decodeEncode".">clarification needed] since the main idea of passivization is to turn an object into a subject in languages whose subject is understood to be the topic by default.
- They rarely have expletives or "dummy subjects" (pleonastic pronouns) like English it in It's raining.
- They often have sentences with so-called "double subjects", actually a topic plus a subject. For example, the following sentence patterns are common in topic-prominent languages:
| Mandarin | Template:Fs interlinear |
| Japanese | Template:Fs interlinear |
- They do not have articles, which are another way of indicating old vs. new information.
- The distinction between subject and object is not reliably marked.This also seems incorrect for Japanese: the subject is marked with the particle が (ga) (when the subject is separate from the topic, marked with は (wa)), and the object is marked with を (o).[<span title="Script error: No such module "decodeEncode".">clarification needed]Hungarian also seems to be an outlier in this regard, consistently distinguishing between agent and patient via use of its noun cases (e.g. nominative "alma" vs accusative "almát").[<span title="Script error: No such module "decodeEncode".">clarification needed]
Lisu, a Lolo–Burmese language, has been described as highly topic-prominent,[1] and Sara Rosen has demonstrated that "while every clause has an identifiable topic, it is often impossible to distinguish subject from direct object or agent from patient. There are no diagnostics that reliably identify subjects (or objects) in Lisu."[2] The ambiguity is demonstrated in the following example:[1]
Examples
Examples of topic-prominent languages include East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Malay, Indonesian, Singaporean English and Malaysian English. Also, Turkish,[3][4] Hungarian,[5] Somali, and Native American languages like the Siouan languages are topic-prominent. Modern linguistic studies have shown that Brazilian Portuguese is a topic-prominent or topic- and subject-prominent language[6][7] (see Brazilian Portuguese#Topic-prominent language). American Sign Language is also considered to be topic-prominent.[8]
Mandarin Chinese
*Remark: Mandarin Chinese sentences are predominantly SVO, but the language allows the object to be promoted to the topic of the sentence, which results in an apparently OSV word order.
Japanese
Lakota
Turkish
American Sign Language
In American Sign Language (ASL), the topic of the sentence is at its beginning. For example, in translating the English phrase "We are going to the store tomorrow", here are some possible ASL sentences, literally translated:
- "WE GO STORE TOMORROW."
- "TOMORROW, STORE WE GO." (TOMORROW is the topic)
- "*STORE, WE GO TOMORROW." (STORE is the topic)
Proper ASL structure, however, uses the time indicator first and so the proper ASL form would be the second one: "TOMORROW, STORE WE GO."
See also
References
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- ^ a b Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Li, Charles N.; Thompson, Sandra A. (1976). "Subject and Topic: A New Typology of Language". In Charles N. Li (ed.). Subject and Topic. New York: Academic Press. pp. 457–489. ISBN 978-0-12-447350-8.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Rosen, Sara Thomas (2007). "Structured Events, Structured Discourse". In Ramchand & Reiss (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-924745-5.
- ^ http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/langtyp.htm Typology of Language Grammars - San Jose State University
- ^ http://www.turkofoni.org/files/a_typological_approach_to_sentence_structure_in_turkish-yilmaz_kili_arslan_trakya_uni.pdf A Typological Approach to Sentence Structure in Turkish - Yılmaz Kılıçaslan
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Kenesei, Istvan; Vago, Robert M.; Fenyvesi, Anna (2002). "1.12. Topic". Hungarian. Routledge. pp. 172–181. ISBN 978-1-134-97646-1.
- ^ Pontes, E. (1987). O tópico no português do Brasil. Pontes Editores.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."As Construções De Tópico No Português Do Brasil: Uma Análise Sintático-Discursiva Em Tempo Real". Filologia.org.br. Retrieved 2012-12-24.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Schick, Brenda Sue (2006). Advances in the Sign Language Development of Deaf Children. Oxford University Press. p. 36. ISBN 0-19-518094-1. Retrieved 2008-09-23.
