Re: How many subjects are allowed?

Ben Finney wrote: 
Bart Mathias <mathias@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

muchan wrote:

the Topic(s) can be the subject, the object, or whatever else...
Or more exactly, the subject, the object, or whatever else, can be
the topic(s).

OK, that's something I will probably never believe. 


How about this:

The topic, once introduced, can be used again as the subject, object,
or whatever else, without being specified again.

It's suggestions like that that make me glad I hedge my bets with "probably"s.

It's easy to think of cases where it can be an unexpressed object in subsequent sentences; what I meant was that I am not quite prepared to believe that, e.g., "sake-wa" in "sake-wa kessite nomanai" is a topic.

But you have induced me to explore a bit, and I find that I can make examples where I would have to claim predicate omission to maintain my "subject-only" assertion. I'll have to think about it; it may be too clumsy.

In fact I thought of a very blatant example of topic = object after signing this post, below the next paragraph! "watasi-wa" in "watasi-wa masayasu-to moosimasu" seems a perfect case of topic.

The theme/rheme business has been one of my major interests (only one paper, that I don't think anyone ever noticed, though) since about 1970. You'd think that by now I'd have it figured out well enough that there would be no danger of having to change my mind about it.

Bart
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