Subject and Topic

First published in 1976, Subject and Topic presents research from the 1975 University of California, Santa Barbara symposium that sought to achieve thorough understanding of two important grammatical concepts: subject and topic. Drawing empirical evidence from diverse language families including Indo-European, Malayo-Polynesian, Sino-Tibetan, Australian, Afro-Asiatic, Mayan, Niger-Congo, Finno-Ugric, Altaic, Caucasian, Iroquoian, Yuman, and Uto-Aztecan, the volume addresses questions about how subjects and topics can be characterized independently of specific languages and their structural roles. Additional contributions, written especially for this volume, examine child language, American Sign Language, and Jacaltec structures, broadening the empirical foundation. The book challenges traditional assumptions: no universal definition exists for identifying subjects or topics across languages. Instead, the studies reveal that languages exhibit varying degrees of subject-prominence and topic-prominence, leading to a proposed typology that represents a significant departure from the formalist linguistics dominant in the 1960s. By prioritizing cross-linguistic data collection over theoretical formalization, this volume established new directions for linguistic research and remains essential reading for students and researchers of linguistics.

Charles N. Li is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Linguistics, UC Santa Barbara, USA. He specializes in evolutionary origin of language; animal communication; and language and brain.

Preface 1. On the notion of subject in ergative languages 2. Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view 3. On the subject of two passives in Indonesian 4. Properties of basic and derived subjects in Jacaltec 5. The manifestation of subject, object, and topic in American sign language 6. Topic, Pronoun, and Grammatical Agreement 7. Imbedded topic in French 8. Relativization and topicalization in Hittite 9. Remarkable subjects in Malagasy 10. Towards a universal definition of "Subject" 11. Topic as a discourse notion: a study of topic in the conversations of children and adults 12. On the subjectless "Pseudo-Passive" in standard Dutch and the semantics of background agents 13. Subject, theme, and the speaker's empathy-a reexamination of relativization phenomena 14. From topic to subject in Indo-European 15. Subject and topic: a new typology of language 16. The subject in Philippine languages: topic, actor, actor-topic, or none of the above 17. On the universality of subjects: the Ilocano case 18. Subject Properties in the North Russian Passive