Re: Topic-comment sentences in Mandarin

On Sun, Jan 21, 2001 at 09:33:24PM -0800, SMITH,MARCUS ANTHONY wrote:
[snip]
> These are referred to as "free topics" and are found in a wide variety of
> languages, including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Gunwinjguan languages (in
> Australia).
Interesting! I've a similar concept in my own conlang, but I haven't
developed it very much yet.

[snip]
> IIRC, the topic must be general, and the argument of the verb must be a
> more specific.  Note for examploe, that "mountain" is the general
> location and "tree" is the more specific thing that is pretty in the
> Japanese examples. In the Mayali example, "animal" is more general, and
> "kangaroo" is more specific. I would predict, then, that you could not
> reverse the nouns in the Chinese examples above and still have a
> grammatical sentence.
That's right! I've never noticed that before :-) Cool, this is something
that'll be very helpful in my own conlang, where this topic-comment(s)
structure is generalized to passages, not merely individual sentences.

Thanks for the tip :-)


T

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