Subject and Topic: A New Typology of Language*

*This paper is an amalgamation of three earlier papers and renders them obsolete: ( 1 ) “Chinese as a Topic-Prominent Language,” prepared and circulated for the 7th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, October, 1974; ( 2 ) “Subject and Topic: A New Typology of Language,” presented at the LSA Annual Meeting, New York, December, 1974; ( 3 ) “Evidence Against Topicalization in Topic-Prominent Languages,” circulated prior to the Symposium on Subject and Topic. We are grateful to the participants of the Symposium and to James H-Y Tai for their valuable comments and to Dr. Edward Hope, who responded from Bangkok to our inquiries about a number of Lisu constructions. During the preparation of this paper, Charles N. Li was supported by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. I Introduction. Since the emergence of descriptive linguistics, linguists have disagreed among themselves over the question of the extent to which languages could be expected to differ from one another. The present paper is an attempt to lay the foundation for a typology based on the grammatical relations subject-predicate and topic-comment. The notion of subject has long been considered a basic grammatical relation in the sentential structure of a language. However, the evidence we have gathered from certain languages suggests that in these languages the basic constructions manifest a topic-comment relation rather than a subject-predicate relation. This evidence shows not only that the notion of topic may be as basic as that of subject in grammatical descriptions, but also that languages may differ in their strategies in construction sentences according to the prominence of the notions of topic and subject. According to our study, there are four basic types of languages: (i) languages that are subject-prominent (a term introduced by E.L. Keenan); (ii) languages that are topic-prominent; (iii) languages that are both subject-prominent and topic-prominent; (iv) languages that are neither subject-prominent nor topicprominent. In subject-prominent (Sp) languages, the structure of sentences favors a description in which the grammatical relation subject-predicate plays a major role; in topicprominent (Tp) languages, the basic structure of sentences favors a description in which the grammatical relation topiccomment plays a major role. In type (iii) languages, there are two equally important distinct sentence constructions, the subject-predicate construction and the topic-comment construction; in type (iv) languages, the subject and the topic have merged and are no longer distinguishable in all sentence types. In order to clarify the subject-predicate construction and the topic-comment construction, we may use two types of English sentences as examples: 1 John hit Mary. Subject Predicate 2 As for education, John prefers Bertrand Russell’s ideas. Topic Comment