Re: New Conlang

On Monday, October 11, 2004, at 04:04 , H. S. Teoh wrote:

>  An interesting feature of this conlang is that verbs "inflect" for
>    mood by changing position in the sentence. The first NP in a
>    sentence is always the "topic" or "focus" (ala TamahÌ), and
>    subsequent NPs are "arguments" (for lack of a better term). The
>    word orderings for the moods are:
> 	indicative:	topic-verb-arguments
> 	interrogative:	topic-arguments-verb
> 	subjunctive:	verb-topic-arguments
A few things puzzling me here. You say that the first NP in a sentence is
always the "topic" or "focus". I assume this is exclusive 'or', as the two
terms are almost opposite in meaning.

But in the word orders given only "topic", "verb" and "arguments" are
mentioned; there is mention of "focus". So:
1. Do we understand that the topic may be replaced by the focus in all
three examples? If so, under what conditions does the focus occupy the
place of the topic?
2. Neither the topic nor the focus need be a NP. By NP are you including,
for example, the NP which follows the preposition in a prepositional
phrase? The examples suggest that the topic (or focus?) will occupy the
given position whether it is a NP or not. Is this so?

Ray
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