The surface coding of the topic in all the languages examined always involve the sentence-initial position. This can be understood in terms of discourse strategies. The topic, or the discourse theme, should be introduced first. 2.7 Grammatical processes The subject but not the topic plays a prom...
There's a substantial differentiation between Chinese topic-commentary sentence and English subject-predicate sentence. The topic in the topic-commentary sentence may refer to one matter, or to a blending of several matters, so the topic is very likely to be represented by a word, a phrase, a...
H1 Selectives tend to be units of the sentence (in the sense of unit with one main clause). H2 Selectives tend to occur early in the sentence. H3 Selectives tend to occur after or at the very end of their constituent. H4 Selectives are associated with (have scope over) a syntactic ...
Additional glosses include: bei = Chinese bèi passive marker; cos = ‘change of state’; exh = exhortative; sfp = ‘sentence final particle’; sp = ‘structural particle’. List of abbreviations: C. = Chinese; E. = English; I. = Italian. In this...