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) |
In morpheme-by-morpheme glosses, this feature bundle is transcribed as '*'.
no-rV-*
1sg-OBL-TOP
karu
be.visible
'I can see it'
Those sounds marked as requiring a segmental marker don't get transformed, but instead what is otherwise the contrastive topic marker -s is attached to the end of the word.
EXAMPLE.