Topic markers in Hmong

Abstract

The data that I will present in this paper arise from my investigations of Hmong syntax in light of the claims made by Li and Thompson (1976) about topic-prominence vs. subject-prominence in languages.1 Li and Thompson state that the sentences of some languages can be more insightfully described in terms of subject-predicate organization, and they call these subject-prominent languages. Indo-European languages, including especially languages like English and French,fall into this category. In other languages, by contrast, sentences are more insightfully described in terms of topic-comment organization, according to Li and Thompson, and they call these topic-prominent languages. Lisu, described by Hope (1974), is a prototypical topic-prominent language, and Lahu (Matisoff 1973) and Chinese (Tsao 1979) are also quite topic-prominent.