bradrn wrote: ↑Wed Apr 29, 2020 4:32 am
I’m actually really surprised that there’s a language where both topic and focus are both marked by movement — I would have thought that a language which marks both would mark them in different ways.
(As it happens, I’m not particularly interested in cases where they both are marked by movement; I was asking because, as I briefly mentioned earlier, I have a topic-prominent conlang, and I was wondering whether I could mark focus with optional ergative marking.)
IIRC, many Mayan languages have both (new/contrastive) topic and focus fronting, but when both occur the order is strictly TOPIC FOCUS VERB OTHER. Remember that Mayan languages are mostly verb-initial, so both new topics and foci are marked by movement to pre-verbal position. The difference between the two is marked by the fact that, amongst other things, focus fronting triggers changes to verbal morphology which don't occur when topics are fronted.
You might be interested to know that Tariana has a case system a bit like what you suggest. There is a suffix -n(h)e that applies to focused / non-topical subjects, and a suffix -nuku that applies to unexpectedly topical non-subjects. This case system effectively marks subjects and objects with unexpected pragmatic status only, since subjects are normally topical and objects are more likely to be non-topical.
Many languages have differential object marking, where objects show differences in case marking or verbal agreement depending on factors such as definiteness, specificity, and/or topicality. Differential subject marking is rarer, but does occur, as in Tariana.
To clarify, do you mean that most topic-prominent languages are pro-drop? (I suppose that they would be NP-drop, if they can drop any ‘old established topics’.)
Most of the languages commonly given as examples are, including Japanese and the various East Asian languages people think of. But even a language which isn't will have a most reduced form of reference, whether it's verbal agreement, a clitic pronoun, or just zero. Whatever that most reduced form is will be used with established, predictable topics.
That’s interesting! I had always assumed that ‘topic-prominent’ was a well-established term by now.
Well, maybe I'm wrong, that's just my point of view. I read the Li and Thompson paper a long time ago, but from what I remember topic prominent case felt a bit like an elsewhere case, defined in opposition mainly by its lack of the features in subject prominent languages. It seems to me that there are some things all languages need to do, including:
1. Marking local / clausal topics
2. Tracking interclausal reference (which is strongly related to tracking discourse topics)
3. Marking the roles of arguments in the clause (actor, patient, ...)
Subject prominent languages adopt a solution to this where all of the above are heavily entangled with the subject grammatical relation. The assignment of the subject marks semantic role (normally actor), topicality, and is also often involved in reference tracking via control, switch-reference marking, etc. And because the subject role is marking both semantic and pragmatic roles, some method is needed to mark when these conflict and subject is allocated to an unexpected semantic role. That's where the various grammatical voices like passive and anti-passive come in. Things become a bit messier with ergative languages, where surface case marking and agreement don't align with the typically topical S/A semantic role, but even these may exhibit wide-spread syntactic control phenomena correlated with topicality, linked either to a covert subject role or to the absolutive role.
Topic prominent languages are simply languages which don't entangle pragmatics and semantic roles to the same extent. But it seems to me that there are lots of different ways to do this. If pragmatics isn't marked by grammatical relations then it will be marked by something else, but that something else may be word order, intonation, topic particles, .... Because in these languages GR assignment is not influenced strongly by pragmatics, grammatical voice is not used to reassign GRs to topical referents, and therefore voice is used less and more to eliminate or add roles instead of rearranging the ones that are already there. Control phenomena become a less useful way to track topical referents in discourse, and in particular when coordinating clauses, because you can't rely on the subject always being topical, so referent tracking tends to be more pragmatic in a different sense: context and the choice of referential devices is used for inter-clausal referent tracking instead, and there are few or no grammatical constraints on control of zero/null subjects.
But none of this means that topic prominent languages can't exhibit control, or have any particular grammatical voice, because the category is not a positive one defined by specific positive features being present, it's more a category defined by the absence of an all-powerful subject GR. The lack of such a GR makes many of these things less useful, but languages very commonly have things that they could seemingly happily live without.
A question about this: is it possible to have a method of overtly marking contrastive focus, but only on some NPs? And is it possible to have two or more methods of marking contrastive focus? (This is related to the aforementioned topic-prominent conlang with optional ergative marking, where the optional ergative marking only extends across part of the animacy hierarchy.)
Sure. Tariana marks topic and focus a bit differently on pronouns compared to regular nouns, for example. But I think you need
some way of making any argument contrastive, and the structures are probably going to be formally similar even if not identical. I don't know of a language that uses a focus suffix for nouns for a cleft construction for pronouns, for example. Although maybe I just haven't read enough grammars?