Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Detail #124: Topics and Case Marking

It seems to me that topics would be a natural place for the case marking rules in a language to have any number of exceptions - and I even imagine these exceptions could be both towards less marking or more marking.

One idea could be to conflate all case marking on topics with the nominative, except that the accusative is retained for objects of a certain nature, and some very specific verb phrases retain specific markings - say the language has a Finnish/Russian-like predicative possession construction, maybe that particular case is retained as well in that particular construction.

Another idea could be to have, say, differential marking on subjects or objects - but only when they're topics. (So, non-topic objects are exclusively accusative, but as topics they can also be some other case - nominative or dative or whathaveyou, subjects as non-topics are exclusively nominative, but for topical subjects, the genitive gives definite subjects).

The justification why case marking could be less detailed follows from the example of Chinese, where topics often have no adpositions. The intuition we could have for this is that the topic is a sort of obvious participant in some way, and we are more likely to be able to expect its role in the sentence than other constituents' roles. However, on the other hand, topics could also imaginably attract more marking, as very central constituents in clauses.

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