Minnesota Papers In Linguistics And Philosophy Of Language, Volume 10, Issue Apr (1985-04). pp. 51-65.
Language:
English
Abstract:
Paper presented at the Minnesota Regional Conference on Language and Linguistics, 11-12 May 1984. C. Li & S. Thompson ("Subject and Topic: A New Typology of Language" in Subject and Topic, Li, C. [Ed], New York: Academic Press, 1976) have claimed that the presence or absence of a passive construction in a language contributes to a typological categorization of the language as topic-prominent or non-topic prominent; topic-prominent langs are claimed to have no passives or only marginal passives, & subject-prominent langs are claimed to have productive passive processes. A structure is examined which has been called the passive construction in Hmong, a Southeast Asian lang of the Miao-Yao family which has some other characteristics of topic-prominent langs. This structure involves the morphemes raug & mag, which are shown to be lexical Vs. It is argued that passive in Hmong is marginal in terms of use & semantic range, & that the constructions themselves are only marginally passive constructions. Constructions with raug & mag present conflicting evidence for the status of topic-prominence in Hmong. The structure is topic-oriented since its function is the promotion or foregrounding of an argument that is the topic by putting it in sentence-initial position. However, the structure is subject-oriented since it achieves this topic prominence by use of a syntactic process that promotes the affected participant to subject. 15 References. Modified AA