Conditionals Are Topics
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2907449 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Haiman (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1978 |
| Volume | 54 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 564-589 |
| Publication date | 1978-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Language (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/lan.1978.0009 |
| OpenAlex | W2046137634 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 212 |
| References cited | 16 |
Conditional clauses and topics are marked identically in a number of unrelated languages. This is a surprising fact, since they are not usually considered to be related categories. Nevertheless, if formal similarity reflects similarity in meaning, they must indeed be related. A review of analyses of conditionals (in the philosophical literature) and of topics (primarily in linguistics) reveals that, in fact, their definitions are very similar. Moreover, it is possible to motivate revisions to these definitions by which they become virtually identical. This paper thus justifies the method of basing semantic analysis of a construction on a cross-linguistic examination of its superficial form
Conjunction (astronomy) · Epistemology · Explication · Identification (biology) · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Similarity (geometry) · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History and Theory of Mathematics · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Conectores de causa e condição em fóruns de discussão na Internet
Rethinking the Role of Invited Inferencing in Change from the Perspective of Interactional Texts
Conditional antecedents as polar free relatives
The ‘Drama-Queen’ and Other Conditionals in Real Discourse
Semantics and pragmatics of (not-)at-issueness in Yucatec Maya attitude reports
Variably future-marked conditionals in Greek
Yes/no questions in Mandarin Chinese revisited
Condition, topic and focus in African languages
Issues on topics
Identical topics in Mandarin Chinese and Shanghainese
Sentence type and specificity
Topic-Prominence Parameter
Papers on information structure in African languages
John Haiman
Iconicity of sequence
Systemic Transfer, Topic Prominence, and the Bare Conditional in Singapore English
The semantics of auxiliary inversion in English
Clause-type, primary illocution, and mood-like operators in English
Demonstratives and non-embedded nominalisations in three Papuan languages of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family
The pragmantax of some Italian conditionals
Responsible subjects and discourse causality. How mental spaces and perspective help identifying subjectivity in Dutch backward causal connectives
Introduction — Tasks for conditionalists
Alors and donc in spoken French
Areal pragmatics of New Guinea
Foregrounding and indirect discourse
Interpreting conditionals
Typology and universals
From Ergativus Absolutus to Topic Marking in Kiranti
The form and function of threats in court
Topic agreement in NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands)
On the directionality from temporal to conditional
Conditionals and the Epistemic Scale
The Iconicity of Grammar
Syntactic Markedness and the Definition of Sentence Topic
Options in the Pragmatic Structuring of Guarani Sentences
Iconicity and Generative Grammar
The Languages of New Guinea
Some Recent Trends in Grammaticalization
From Sentence to Discourse
Simplification of Input
Conditional constructions in African languages
Le conditionnel en Dzuungoo de Somogohiri
Conditionals in Tuwuli
New information and contrastiveness in Haida
Competing motivations for the ordering of main and adverbial clauses
Be going to and will
Nominalization in Asian Languages
Take Care of the Poets! Verbal Art Performances as Key Factors in the Preservation of Kalasha Language and Culture
Expressing conditionality in Mandarin
The Making of Vernacular Singapore English
Conditionals
Dependency, Constituency, and Linear Order
Heads, Arguments, and Adjuncts
A Radical Approach to Syntactic Relations
Syntactic Theory and the Theory of Language
Syntactic Argumentation and Radical Construction Grammar
The Voice Continuum
Parts of Speech
Clausal Syntactic Roles (“Grammatical Relations”)
The Coordination—Subordination Continuum
Syntactic Categories and Semantic Relativity
World Lexicon of Grammaticalization
Cognitive Grammar
World Lexicon of Grammaticalization
Mental Spaces in Grammar
Grammaticalization
Towards a typology of clause linkage
Speech act distinctions in grammar
The Oxford handbook of grammaticalization
The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure
Verum Focus
Pre- and post-positioning of wenn-clauses in spoken and written German
Information Structure in Slavic
Grammaticalization in Slavic languages
Information Structure and Discourse Particles
Tonal reassociation and rising tonal contours in Naxi
Concessive conditionals in the languages of Europe
On correlations between word order and pragmatic function of conditional sentences in German
Expressing conditionality in Mandarin
Syntax and Semantics of Resumption
Radical Construction Grammar
Projection in Interaction and Projection in Grammar
Using hierarchical clustering to identify patterns of clause combining in written Hebrew narratives
Sur la syntaxe des constructions corrélatives en wh- en vietnamien contemporain
Étude du topicaliseur thì en vietnamien
Opiniões Em Confronto
Des-, Mata- Ja Maks-Konverbitarindi Inforoll
Multi-functional deictics in South Central Tibeto-Burman
Emergence of a subordinate construction in a sign language
Le début des phrases en français parlé
Precedence clauses in the world’s languages
A cross-linguistic analysis of cross-clausal associations
The syntax of Korean reduced conditionals
Adverbial V3 in Early New High German? Construction(s) with So
The interplay of contrast markers (‘but’), selectives (“topic markers”) and word order in the fuzzy oppositive contrast domain
Éléments de description du mwerlap (langue du Nord-Vanuatu)
Copula functions in a cross-Sinitic perspective
The issue of arbitrariness in syntactic reconstruction
Being pragmatic about biscuits
Polar Question Particles and Their Sources
Readings in Social Psychology
A grammar of spoken Chinese.
Tagalog Reference Grammar
A Theory of Conditionals
How To Do Things With Words
Subject and Topic
Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte
Syntactic Structures
A Study in Polysemy
Topic, focus, and deep structure
Topic and focus in transformational grammar
On left dislocation 1
Russisches etymologisches Worterbuch
Introduction to Logical Theory
Fact, fiction, and forecast
Abductive and Deductive Change
| Unique citing works | 170 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 4,51 |
| Citation span | 1979 - 2026 (48) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 159 |