Abstract:
English lacks the topical precision of topic-prominent languages, but with a touch of creativity, we can construct sentences that are almost as good.
On pages 181-182 of The Atoms of Language, author/linguist Mark C. Baker describes a feature of Japanese that is absent in English. English is a subject-prominent language. Its sentences are normally composed of a subject, a verb and frequently an object. In comparison, Japanese, a topic-prominent language, usually employs a noun phrase, clearly marked as the topic with the word “wa”, followed by a sentence incorporating this topic. Other topic-prominent languages include Vietnamese, Korean, Hungarian and (surprisingly) Singapore English.
Becoming better wordsmiths and writers