An analysis of topics in Prinmi: In a cross-linguistic perspective

Abstract

Prinmi is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces of southwest China. It demonstrates a high degree of topic prominence, as discussed in Li and Thompson (1976). Topic prominence is a typological characteristic of Sino-Tibetan languages, cf. Chao‘s (1968) analysis of spoken Chinese. It probably represents an areal feature of South-East Asia, which, as a linguistic area, embraces mainland South-East Asia and south China. Furthermore, topic prominence is also observed in such Sinospheric languages as Japanese and Korean. This paper presents an analysis of topics in Prinmi, based on first-hand data collected for a large scale typological study of information structure. A variety of topics are found in Prinmi in the study; Table 1 shows how they may be encoded. The topic-comment construction can be used to convey complex information, such as: (a) Chained comment construction: Topic + Comment1 + Comment2 (+ … + Commentn) (b) Contrastive topic-comment construction: Topic1-Comment1 + Topic2-Comment2 (+ … + Topicn-Commentn) (c) Recursive topic-comment: Hanging TopicS + Comment // TopicS1-Comment1 (+ … + TopicSn-CommentSn) I will discuss the function of the variety of topics in Prinmi. Their encoding as well as the syntactic structure of topic-comment construction will be investigated in detail.