Talk:Topic-prominent language

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How does it differ from analytic language? --Puzzlet Chung 17:24, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That belongs on a different classification. "Topic-prominent" implies a certain organization of propositions and sentences (pragmatics). "Analytic" is a matter of morphemes being more or less isolated (morphology). Chinese is analytic and topic-prominent. Japanese is quite synthetic and also topic-prominent. --Pablo D. Flores 21:00, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Common features ...

"They do not have articles, which are another way of indicating old vs. new information."

This statement of course is true with regard to e.g. Chinese and Japanese, yet is not regarding other languages listed here, like - not to speak of French! - Hungarian and maybe Laḱota (this having various kinds of so-called topic markers as kiŋ, k'uŋ, waŋ, eya, etaŋ, ċa etc. that in many cases can be translated as articles). Yet, still making my confusion complete was a statement I encountered recently when reading Steven Pinker's Language Instinct: there, even good old German is listed among the topic-prominent languages :Q Now, as it seems, almost all languages except for English (with its pretty strict word order) may join this club here hmm? Wayasu (talk) 18:58, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

ASL example

Why is the third ASL example marked with "*"? Does it mean it's ungrammatical? --89.1.71.7 10:46, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Isn't the ASL rather an example of the "various idiosyncratic means for topicalization" used by non-topic-prominent languages? --Ippei 12:45, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

French?

French loves to use disjunctive pronouns, e.g. "on va le tuer, le docteur!" - is this topic-prominency? It's an IE language, however. Elle _{vécut heureuse} ^{à jamais} (Be eudaimonic!) 02:14, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

In a way it is, but as to its syntax, I think it is clearly of non-topic-prominent language's that has much less systematic means of marking topic. --Ippei 12:52, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

No, it's not. By "on va le tuer" you repeated the object "le". That's a normal object. Chinese, however, doesn't need the topic to be repeated. --2.245.78.187 (talk) 23:56, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

A better example might be the "le X, c'est Y" construction which occurs very often in everyday French and which is overtly topic-comment. We may also think of sentences of the type "Là, j'suis pas sûr." In Ivorian French this là (which here replaces the unwieldy "as far as...is concerned" - en ce qui concerne) has grown into a topic-marking postfix, something which is not the case with metropolitan French. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:69B9:D68D:6068:1819 (talk) 16:34, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

Or consider constructions such as "C'est moi qui suis le coupable." In traditional analysis, C'est moi is the main clause and qui... a subordinate clause, which would be fine of course, if it were not for that tell-tale suis which suggest rather that the underlying statement is Je suis le coupable. We could then analyse C'est moi qui as quite analogous to Watashi wa in Japanese and the form suis would make perfect sense as a finite main verb. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:899:80ED:A6DA:BEAD (talk) 15:40, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Hungarian?

Being pretty familiar with Hungarian, I'd like to learn as in what way (if at all, to what extent?) it can be classified as a topic-prominent language. If this actually holds true, I'm afraid of having been unaware of this feature for about four decades :( Wayasu (talk) 17:41, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

It has been the predominant view for quite some time now that Hungarian is a topic-prominent language. Try anything by Katalin É. Kiss (list of publications). prezzey (talk) 10:17, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for replying. I'd be most grateful if you could give an example on the site respective, will you? Seeing that you're also familiar with Hebrew, what's your opinion on this one? (BTW, I've been struggling with designing kind of a Chomskyan description of Lakota syntax for quite some time now...). Wayasu (talk) 19:27, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Arabic?

I'd have expected Arabic being listed: Allah hu akbar: as-for-G-d: he-is great Any comments? Wayasu (talk) 17:41, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

It is Allahu akbar, where -u is a case suffix (i'rab) indicating nominative case, similar to -us in Latin, and the phrase is simply a noun modified by an adjective, not a topic-comment construction. --JWB (talk) 16:39, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! Wayasu (talk) 19:58, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

I thought Arabic might be listed for a different reason. Sentences classified as "nominal" in traditional Arabic grammar, which are composed of a subject and predicate, are similar to topic-comment structures. For instance, الرجل له ابن Ar-rajulu lahu (i)bn "The man has a son" (literally, "The man to him a son"), which I think can be extended recursively into الرجل له ابن طب Ar-rajulu lahu (i)bnu ṭibb "The man's son is a doctor" ("The man to him son a doctor"), and probably further. I'm not sure if this is enough to qualify Arabic as a topic-prominent language, but maybe it's worth mentioning somewhere in the article. It's certainly more topic-prominent than English, in which these structures could only be used in colloquial speech. — Eru·tuon 18:45, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Significance?

Any information on cultural consequences of topic-prominent language versus non-topic-prominent language?

That wouldn't be hard science IMHO. --Kjoonlee 21:14, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Slavic languages

So Slavic languages are also topic-prominent? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.101.76.122 (talk) 19:28, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

English?

Um ... I understand the English clause to place great emphasis on theme and rheme in its informational structure. No mention in the article. Very bizarre. Tony (talk) 14:27, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Korean

The Korean language is also topic-prominent, someone please add. The use of particles, including the topic marker, is quite similar to Japanese. --Atitarev (talk) 22:42, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Korean is already mentioned in the lead-in to the article. There does not need to be an example of a sentence from every single language that is topic-prominent; that would make this a List, not an Article. (Not to mention it would be impossible to compile that many examples.) —Politizer^{( talk • contribs )} 22:55, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. --Atitarev (talk) 23:32, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

The Lakota example

I don't speak a word of Lakota, so I don't know for myself whether it is a topic-prominent language or not. However, the example given, or at least its translation, is not a good illustration of this concept. It turns into "As for me, some horses, I caught them" into "It was me who caught some horses". In Japanese these are opposites! The former is "Watashi wa uma o tsukamatta" (speaker, i.e. 'watashi', as topic) and the latter is "Watashi ga uma o tsukamatta" (speaker as subject but not topic). The Lakota example should be amended or removed. - furrykef (Talk at me) 23:57, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Query

The article says " (As for) me, some horses: I caught them. -> It was me who caught some horses (I caught some horses)"

It seems to me very highly unlikely that there would exist a language in which "I caught some horses" and "It was me who caught some horses" would be translated identically from English.

This passage, in which Lakota is used as an example, follows several passages in which the author lists things that topic-prominent languages are said to not have. Hence it seems that topic-prominent languages are notable for their deficiencies. The author then claims that a single Lakota sentence is translatable, in the absence of any context, into two quite different English sentences. If this were true, it would only be possible in isolation, never is use as language rather than teecher's sampul.

The drift of the whole seems to be that topic-prominent languages just sorta blunder around, crippled by their short-comings, and can't make it clear whether a speaker is talking about catching horses or about claiming responsibility for catching horses.

Can this really be true?

My discomfort with these notions is prompted in part by the importance in the press of the resuscitated 2015年01月26日08:54 来源：人民网－中国共产党新闻网 （《中华魂》授权中国共产党新闻网独家发布，请勿转载）originally printed in obscurity some years ago.

No doubt the popularity of the article is motivated as much by the touching "please don't reprint" as it is by its usefulness to President Xi's current censorship campaigns.

The English translations of the article that I have seen seem to come from the Hudson Institute, a group of American defense intellectuals whose biases amusingly mirror and reverse those of the article's writer, olde Marxist Pang.

In my opinion the American English translations of this article contain exactly the sorts of confusion that I think the linguist author of this Wikipedia entry falls into. The American translators feel free to use what they believe to be the deficiencies of the Chinese language to insert their own arrant biases into their translations.

David Lloyd-Jones (talk) 09:05, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Spaces

I know you want to show the single words, but Chinese and Japanese don't use spaces. They should be removed. --2.245.173.181 (talk) 19:38, 29 September 2015 (UTC)