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Conditionals are Topics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

John Haiman
John Haiman*
Affiliation:
University of Manitoba
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Abstract

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.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , September 1978 , pp. 564 - 589
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 by Linguistic Society of America

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