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, like Japanese and Korean, from subject-prominent languages, like 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.
Video Topic-prominent language
Common features of topic-prominent languages
Many topic-prominent languages share several syntactic features that have arisen because, in these languages, sentences 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, 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.
- They usually do not 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:
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- (Mandarin) Zhège rén gèzi h?n g?o.
- ??? ?? ???
- ??? ?? ???
- "This person (topic) height (subject) tall."
- (Japanese) Sono yashi-wa happa-ga ookii.
- ?? ??? ???? ????
- "That palm tree (topic) leaves (subject) are big."
- 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
The Lolo-Burmese language Lisu has been described as highly topic-prominent, 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." This ambiguity is demonstrated in the following example:
Maps Topic-prominent language
Examples
Examples of topic-prominent languages include East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Malay, Turkish, Indonesian, Singaporean English and Malaysian English. Hungarian, the Somali language, and Amerindian tongues like the Siouan languages are also topic-prominent. Modern linguistic studies have shown that Brazilian Portuguese is a topic-prominent or topic- and subject-prominent language (see Brazilian Portuguese#Topic-prominent language). American Sign Language is also considered to be topic-prominent.
Mandarin Chinese
Japanese
Lakota
Turkish
See also
- Topic marker
- Topic-comment
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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