Re: Italian Particles

Tim Smith wrote:

>It sounds to me as if what's happening is that Teonaht is "giving in" to
>the very widespread cross-linguistic tendency for the topic to go at the
>beginning of the sentence, or as close to the beginning as other
>constraints allow.  (I say "widespread" but not "universal", because I know
>of at least one clear counterexample: Malagasy, where the topic generally
>goes at the end.)
It's not actually clear to me that Malagasy is a counterexample.  It really
depends on what you mean by "topic".  If you mean "topic" in the sense
of topic-comment structure in clauses, then yes, Malagasy is a counter-
example.  If you mean "topic" in the sense of "what this chunk of discourse
is about", then Malagasy is not a counterexample.  According to my
analysis, the clause-final constituent in a Malagasy sentence is what
I loosely call a "sentence-level topic"--that is, the element about which
the rest of the sentence is predicated.  It's not a discourse topic in any
significant sense, since it can change from sentence to sentence (and
even from clause to clause within the same sentence) without any
shift in the focus of attention in the discourse.  Malagasy *does* have
"discourse-level topics" too, but these occur at the beginning of the
sentence rather than the end, just like in other languages.

Matt.