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
Both main topic markers are ultimately descended from su, the third person pronoun.
The basic topic marker
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 |
|---|---|
| m w | ɸ~w̥ |
| v | f |
| t d n | θ |
| l | ɬ |
| r | r̥ |
| j | j̥ |
| k g | x |
| h θ s ɬ r̥ 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.
hise-s
money-TOP
sagi-d-l
digital.quant.data.be.there-here-NEG
'The money's gone!'
Su (the third person pronoun) itself is unique in that it is by default interpreted as the topic without any marking, so the topicalised form of su is su.
su
3sg[TOP]
sima-ku-t-wwe
drive-to.there-PERF-Q
'Did he go there?'
The contrastive topic marker
The contrastive topic marker is a simple suffix -s.
no-rV-s
1sg-OBL-CTOP
karu
be.visible
'I at least can see it'
Su can be contrastively topicalised, as suthy.
Function
Crosslinguistically, a topic is a referent that is what the sentence it's in is "about"—with the focus (or remainder) providing new or at-issue information which is "about" the topic. Usually topics need to be already known to the listener, and more discourse-active referents are more likely to be topics.
Complicating this, Mirja is often content to drop references to referents that are easily inferable from context, and at times it may be difficult to determine which dropped argument was a topic and which wasn't.
Topicality and inversion
- Main article: Inverse marking
In Mirja, the default assumption is that whatever is marked as the topic is going to be the subject. When this assumption does not hold, the verb is marked with the inverse marker -e.
EXAMPLE.