Re: Probability of a definite article becoming a topicaliser?

Staving Keith Gaugan:
>Something John said in the article replacement thread put an odd thought
>in my head. Here goes:
>
>Say we have a language, and that language manages to (mostly) lose its
>definite article. How probable is it that the remainents of the definite
>article could become a topicaliser particle? Or more to the point, is
>there any real language out there where this happened?
Sounds highly plausible. A language could adopt a topic-comment structure,
and as a result topic/non-topic becomes a more important distinction than
definite/indefinite. In Japanese, at least, the topic is always definite,
and definite and indefinite are not distinguished otherwise. The article is
therefore lost with non-topical nouns.

Pete Bleackley