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6 votes

How is topic-prominence different than OSV word order?

To put it simply, "topic" and "object" are not the same. The topic can have any syntactic role in the sentence (subject, object, main verb, etc): it's whichever element is most ...
Draconis's user avatar
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3 votes

Why don't topic-prominent languages have articles/determiners?

IMO this is a misleading statement in the Wiki article. The section begins by saying (emphasis added) Many topic-prominent languages share several syntactic features that have arisen because the ...
user6726's user avatar
  • 83.3k
3 votes
Accepted

How is topic-prominence different than OSV word order?

A topic-prominent language is one that structures sentences so at to make most-obvious what the discourse topic is, and what comment is made about that topic. This can be done in various ways, ...
user6726's user avatar
  • 83.3k
2 votes

Why don't topic-prominent languages have articles/determiners?

This may be a case where a Eurocentric view is good enough. Roughly half the European languages have articles, and half don’t, and it varies within families and even dialect continua, and between ...
Adam Bittlingmayer's user avatar
1 vote

How does order of prepositional phrases effect semantics?

For the larger picture: Yes there are categorisations of languages based on information structure. The most traditional terminology would call the two roles theme and rheme, more modern terminology ...
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar

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