Topic marking

Topic marking is a fundamental part of Mirja grammar, and participates in some fairly fundamental systems. There are two main topic markers in Mirja—the 'simple topic marker' and the 'contrastive topic marker'—and a couple of other things (such as -si 'also') also behave like topic markers.

Form of the topic markers

Mirja's most basic and simple topic marker—glossed as simply 'TOP'—usually surfaces only as a modification to the final consonant of the word it attaches to. Specifically, it takes whatever the last consonant of that word is and converts it to a voiceless fricative. The specific results are shown by the table below.

Original	Topicalised
h m w	ɸ~w̥
v	f
t d n	θ
l	ɬ
r	ɾ̥
j	j̥~ç
k g	x
θ s ɬ ɾ̥ x	(segmental marker)