topic-prominent language
A topic-prominent language is one that organizes its syntax so that sentences have a topic-comment (or theme-rheme) structure, where the topic is the thing being talked about (predicated) and the comment is what is said about the topic. This structure is independent of the syntactic ordering of subject, verb and object, and may be marked by word order (typically mentioning the topic first thing in the sentence, and then the comment), or by explicit morphology (as in Japanese with the clitic particle wa).
The difference between topic-prominent languages and non-topic-prominent languages is that topic marking is done systematically in the former, while the latter resort to various idiosyncratic means for topicalization.
Examples of topic-prominent languages are East Asian languages such as the Chinese languages, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Malay, Indonesian, Singaporean English and Malaysian English, as well as Hungarian and the Somali language.
Common features of topic-prominent languages
- They tend to downplay the role of the passive voice, if a passive construction exists at all, since the main idea of passivization is to turn an object into a subject in languages where the subject is understood to be the topic by default. The Japanese passive voice has a specific connotation that restricts its use.
- They usually don't have "dummy subjects" (pleonastic pronouns) like English it in It's raining. Since topic-prominent languages do not consider the subject, but the topic, to be the most important part of the sentence, it may not matter if there is no apparent subject (see also null subject language, pro-drop language).
- They often have sentences with so-called "double subjects", actually a topic plus a subject, for example: Sono yashi-wa happa-ga ookii (Japanese) — "That palm tree (topic), leaves (subject) are big".
- They do not have articles, which are another way of indicating old vs. new information.
Examples
Chinese
| 張三 | 我 | 已經 | 見過 | 了。 | |
| Transcription: | Zhāng Sān | wǒ | yǐjīng | jiànguò | le. |
| Gloss: | Zhang San | I | already | see-EXPERIENCE | NEWSTATE |
| Translation: | (As for) Zhang San, I've seen (him) already. | ||||
Japanese
| 魚は | 鯛が | 美味しい。 | |
| Transcription: | Sakana-wa | tai-ga | oishi-i. |
| Gloss: | "fish"-TOPIC | "red snapper"-SUBJECT | "be delicious"-NONPAST |
| Translation: | As for fish, red snapper is delicious. | ||
Bibliography
- Li, Charles N./Sandra A. Thompson (1976): "Subject and Topic: A New Typology of Languages", in: Li, Charles N. (ed.) Subject and Topic, New York/San Francisco/London: Academic Press, 457-490.
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